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PERSONALISM 

AND THE 

PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

AN APPRECIATION OF THE WORK OF 

BORDEN PARKER BOWNE 



BY 
RALPH TYLER FLEWELLING 

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 

BY RUDOLF EUCKEN 




THE METHODIST ROOK CONCERN 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



** 






Copyright, 1915, by 
RALPH TYLER FLEWELLING 



t'P 



©CI.A411483 

SEP 14 1915 



TO B. P. B. 

WHOSE WORDS OF TRUTH WERE 
A BEACON LIGHT TO MANY SOULS, 

AND 

TO HIS PUPILS 

WHOSE LOVE ABIDES THROUGH 
TIME AND CHANGE 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Foreword 11 

INTRODUCTORY 
Chapter I 
The Work of Borden Parker Bowne. By 

Rudolf Eucken 17 

Chapter II 

The Changing Mood of the Age 32 

Dominance of the practical in modern life — 
The struggle for unity — The present crisis 
— The new task of philosophy. 

SECTION I 

NATURALISM 

Chapter III 

The Modern Spell of a Greek Phantom ... 49 

The ancient dream of material unity — The 

phantom of form and space — Perpetuation 

of the doctrine through Epicurean and 

Stoic — Revival and development of the 

doctrine in modern science — The difficulty 

of naturalistic explanation. 

7 



CONTENTS 

Chapter IV 

PAGE 

The Evaded Problems of Spencer's Phil- 
osophy 59 

The much-known Unknowable — The little- 
known reality — The theory of evolution — 
The definition of life and mind. 

Chapter V 
Bowne as an Antagonist of Naturalism. ... 73 
All philosophical values hinge on the definition 
of reality — Is God immanent Mover or 
prime Mover? — The personality of the 
World-Ground — Is Freedom possible in 
the natural world? 

SECTION II 
IDEALISM 
Chapter VI 

The Kantian Starting-Point 87 

Has the mind a task in experience? — Where 
can we find a permanent world? — What 
lies behind the appearance of things? — 
Can we "prove" the world of spirit? 

Chapter VII 
The Absolute Philosophy, Lotze and 

Bowne 98 

Is the world more than knowledge? — Of what 
does reality consist? — Bowne's debt to 
Lotze — Bowne's advance on Lotze's sys- 
tem. 

8 



CONTENTS 

SECTION III 
PRAGMATISM 

Chapter VIII pAGE 
The Unmetaphysical Pragmatism of Wil- 
liam James 113 

The pragmatic element in the history of 
philosophy — Can the pragmatic test of 
truth be maintained? — Are space and 
time the abiding realities? — Pluralism a 
confession of failure to unite subject and 
object — Can pragmatic pluralism reach 
freedom or solve the problem of evil? 

Chapter IX 
Bowne's Pragmatism, "A Step in the De- 
velopment of Philosophy" 130 

A pragmatic definition of Being — The escape 
from pluralism and absolutism to world- 
unity — The ideal nature of time and space 
— The pragmatic test for religious values. 

SECTION IV 
BOWNE AND SOME PRESENT-DAY 
THINKERS 
Chapter X 
Bergson, The Abstractions of an Imper- 
sonal Philosophy 145 

Can knowledge and life be brought together 
on the empirical basis? — Time as duration 

9 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

— The "vital impulse" assumed for the 
sake of freedom — A harmony due to iden- 
tity of impulsion — His doctrine of knowl- 
edge. 

Chapter XI 
Eucken — The Return to Spiritual "Verity. . 169 
Reality must include more than things, and 
more than ideas — Truth must have a com- 
mon validity — Eucken's personal idealism, 
the realization of the life of the spirit — 
The absence of the Christological interest. 

Chapter XII 
Bowne's Personalism and the Problems of 

Life 183 

Unity possible only through personalism — 
Personalism and freedom — Personalism and 
the problem of evil. 

Bibliography 197 

Index 201 



10 



FOREWORD 

The essential problems of philosophy are 
few. Out of three or four fundamental, 
presuppositions flow whole systems of 
thought. Unless the fountain itself is clear 
the outflowing streams cannot be kept so. 
The nature of reality, or being, is the funda- 
mental principle by which all systems are to 
be judged. Given the basic attitude toward 
this problem, it is easy to see what the 
logical goal will be. Next to the question 
of reality are those of space and time, and 
the relation of life to knowledge. These are 
the main questions about which all others 
hinge. For this reason these terms will 
appear frequently in the following pages, as 
we attempt to trace the leading philo- 
sophical ideas down to modern times, and 
to discover their relation to the thought of 
Bowne. 

He would have been the last to claim 
11 



FOREWORD 

finality for his system. He assumed only 
to clear away a foundation for accurate 
thinking, to expose the common sophistries 
of thought, and to give a basis on which to 
build. In these positions he felt funda- 
mentally secure, being not satisfied to speak 
"after the manner of the scribes." We be- 
lieve the future will amply justify his 
confidence. 

This work was undertaken reluctantly in 
the sense that the writer knew there were 
many others who might have performed the 
task more worthily; with alacrity, in the 
consciousness that there was need to point 
out the place which Bowne's system occu- 
pies in the history of philosophy, and that 
more than five years have passed without 
this being done. This feeling was inten- 
sified by the expressed desire of Professor 
Eucken that such a work be undertaken. 

The author does not aim at an exhaustive 
discussion, but, rather, at a brief and sug- 
gestive treatment that shall define for the 
popular mind the relation of Bowne's 
thought to other philosophical endeavors. 
To forestall disappointment it should be 
12 



FOREWORD 

said there is need for a more detailed and 
technical work than is possible within the 
limits of so small a volume. To make a 
book that shall be brief and yet clear to 
the nonprofessional mind, that shall drop 
technical terms whenever possible and yet 
satisfy the exacting student, is exceedingly 
difficult. The writer makes no pretense of 
being sufficient for so great a task. If, 
however, this effort shall succeed in ex- 
pressing the deep love and respect felt by 
one whose intellectual horizons were en- 
larged by the touch of a master in the 
realm of thought, and shall lead to a re- 
newed study of that master's work, its 
purpose will have been achieved. 

Acknowledgments are due to Zion's 
Herald for the use of materials first printed 
therein; to Dr. Marshall Livingstone Per- 
rin, who transcribed and translated Profes- 
sor Eucken's chapter, which was one of the 
American addresses; to Dr. Albert C. Knud- 
son for valuable criticism; and to Professor 
Eucken himself, for his generous interest 
and encouragement. 



13 



INTRODUCTORY 



CHAPTER I 

THE WORK OF BORDEN PARKER 
BOWNE 

BY RUDOLF EUCKEN 

I never had the pleasure of a personal 
acquaintance with Dr. Bowne, and felt the 
touch of his personality only through our 
correspondence, which was, indeed, most 
hearty and intimate. I felt that our rela- 
tion to each other was close and most 
friendly. He intended to visit Jena on his 
way to Constantinople, whither he expected 
to take a trip in a few months; but within a 
week after receiving the letter containing 
the news of his promised visit I received 
the announcement of his untimely death. 
It is a sad pleasure to rue, and yet a satis- 
faction, to be able to give this evidence of 
my personal admiration for Dr. Bowne, and 
for his personality as shown in his writings. 

The first general impression which one 
receives in taking up his books is a favorable 
17 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

one, on account of the concise and definite 
form in which they are written, so clear in 
concept and straightforward in expression, 
not at all confused or indistinct. They are 
pervaded by an energy and manliness which 
show no fear, either of criticism on the part 
of the half-enlightened, or of the dictum of 
those assuming to be in authority. On the 
contrary, his words are sympathetic and al- 
most tender in his desire to recognize what 
is good in the writings of others, with an 
unsparing denial of what he considers might 
do harm. His works show a personal 
warmth which gives the reader almost the 
impression of "confessions" on the part of 
a living and strong personality. This fea- 
ture is especially to be valued, inasmuch as 
he himself placed a very high estimate upon 
personality. He says to the reader, "Above 
all things be personal in the expression of 
truth as you see it." 

Secondly, we find in his writings his own 
inmost convictions expressed clearly, and 
the openness of his "confessions" is a 
marked and fascinating element in them. 
In reading some philosophers we feel in 
18 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

them what I might call personal untruth, as 
in Schopenhauer, who preaches a Hindu's 
self-abnegation and indifference, while we 
find him personally the genuine epicure. 
The question arises at once, What have his 
great ideas made out of a man, if in his 
own life we find him to be small? On the 
other hand, I find in Spinoza the expression 
of his own inner convictions, and I must 
have respect for him even though I do not 
agree with his conclusions. In reading- 
Bo wne one respects and agrees, for there is 
no word uttered behind which one does not 
feel the man. 

Let us turn now to the content of his 
works, the central thought. Bowne has 
often been placed by the side of Lotze, the 
famous Gottingen professor with whom he 
studied. There are many points of simi- 
larity as well as many differences. 

First, Lotze was a logician, a dialectician; 
he struggled to overcome the material or 
else to reconcile it. Lotze's religion we feel 
rather to be on the fringe of life, and it is a 
question whether it ever affects the central 
thought. For this reason it does not exert 
19 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

any strong influence upon his philosophy. 
Bowne, on the contrary, puts religion at 
the very center, and regards it as the crown 
of being, maintaining that metaphysics and 
logic are enlightened by the fundamental 
question of religion, and are to be under- 
stood only in connection with it. While 
Bowne makes a definite distinction between 
religion and ethics, he makes it clear that 
they are inseparable, and that the one 
gains worth in the light of the other. The 
relation between them is that of the deep 
and underlying to its manifestation. The 
two should not be studied apart. And, 
moreover, the keynote of both lies in per- 
sonality, which gives value to religion as 
well as to ethics. Studying them further, 
he maintains that religion includes ethics. 
This view he bases upon the close connec- 
tion of religion with every kind of moral 
progress and advancement. 

Religion cannot be proved or explained 
in ordinary words; neither can anything 
that lies deep in our nature. Aristotle as- 
serts that the knowledge of anything must 
be derived from something higher than it- 
20 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

self. Religion, therefore, would have to be 
proved through something of a still higher 
nature, and as we have access to nothing 
higher, it must remain unproved. Conse- 
quently, we must not try to prove it but 
to illustrate it; and this we may do by 
showing that every phenomenon depends 
closely upon it, and also, that an intelligent 
being is the established basis of every 
reality. Hence religion lies at the basis of 
our life if it is real; and if this be denied, 
there is nothing to fall back upon. Bowne 
maintains that any other attempt to ex- 
plain life is due to bad thinking. The 
practical application of any tenet is so 
important in Bowne* s philosophy that he 
takes this truth almost for granted, for by 
it our very life becomes exalted and val- 
uable. The proof of religion, then, so far 
as it can be proved, is the creation of a new 
life and a new world in a man. 

Secondly, the content of the world 
points to a unity in the universe. We 
must learn to see more unity in the world's 
phenomena, or, rather, behind them. The 
reign of law in all existence shows that 
21 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

there is interaction among all the elements 
of nature. What would happen if the 
world were made up of separate, inde- 
pendent particles? There would be no 
mutual interaction. As it is, we know 
that what happens in A produces a result 
in B, so that every phenomenon depends 
strictly upon a cause, and proceeds from 
something else. If all things were inde- 
pendent of one another, nothing could re- 
sult. Again, this unity must rest in mind 
or spirit, for it is not to be found in the 
visible; it is to be sought in the invisible. 
And, once again, no spiritual mind can 
exist without personality, for otherwise it 
would be shadowy and vague and have no 
independent existence of its own. Such a 
mind must be an active, self-existent prin- 
ciple, and such a principle must exist; so 
far Lotze and Bowne advance together. 
Bowne further adds that this activity in 
nature must proceed from a God, who shall 
be considered the active, underlying prin- 
ciple. As Goethe says in Faust, "Nature is 
the garment of God." 

There are two ways of viewing phe- 
22 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

nornena: first, as mere appearance; and, 
secondly, with some Being behind them as 
a personal Mind. Now every language has 
expressions for the visible, but only meta- 
phors for the spiritual and invisible. Love 
is inexpressible, and cannot be defined; no 
more can personality. The manifestation 
can be described, but this has nothing to 
depend upon without a deeper basis for its 
very existence. Bowne maintained, in the 
face of fierce criticism, that we must be 
able to force our way to the certainty of 
some such basis. It is wrong, as well as 
foolish, to say that we must be content 
with the visible and be satisfied with 
leaving the invisible as something incom- 
prehensible; and it is erroneous to say that 
we can appreciate only the visible. If we 
study the life of Luther, shall we regard 
him merely as a phenomenon, and say he 
had no real existence? No, indeed. Luther 
was the true man behind it all, and his acts 
were the expression of this hidden existence. 
We must believe in a creative power behind 
all phenomena or we are not true even to 
our own subjective lives. 
23 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

I should like to recommend to your 
younger men a good subject for a disserta- 
tion, and it would be, "Bowne's Philosophy 
in Relation to that of Kant," together with 
the objections which Bowne would raise 
against the latter. Hegel, too, makes a great 
deal of "thought processes." To all this 
Bowne replies: "All right, if a personal 
existence is recognized as a basis for them; 
otherwise, there is no reality to these proc- 
esses." Bowne is a sharp critic, not un- 
kind, not fault-finding, but severely pun- 
ishing those writers who assume to be 
contented with the natural, the visible, or 
with the impersonal spirit. He demands 
personal spiritual life, and consequently a 
living personal God, out of whom proceeds 
all power, and who is the active principle 
from whom all phenomena set forth. An- 
other thesis that I would suggest to young 
men is, "Bowne as an Opponent of the Ma- 
terialists," for, indeed, he was the chief op- 
ponent of naturalism. Naturalists deny the 
metaphysical and take the visible as the 
basis of their so-called metaphysics. This 
is illogical, as it turns effect into cause. So 
24 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

Bowne criticizes evolutionists for commonly 
confusing the ideas of cause and effect. 
The visible, which is, after all, only the 
effect, is assumed to proceed and develop of 
itself. Bowne goes farther. He not only 
makes these truths which he asserts the 
basis of all real theism; he has developed 
a metaphysics of theism. He does not 
simply posit certain truths of theism, but 
treats all these from a metaphysical stand- 
point, and this is of great value to-day in 
the field of philosophy. 

If we consider the content of religion ac- 
cording to Bowne and his development of 
it, we find three leading points which mark 
the chief directions of his thought: First, 
religion consists in life, and not in teaching 
or doctrine; second, the kernel of religion 
is ethical, and religion is the lodestar of 
ethics, with which it is inseparably con- 
nected; third, religion is common to all 
humanity. I might add as a possible defi- 
nition of Bowne's standpoint that religion 
is the spiritual experience of humanity and 
is manifested in the individual. 

Concerning the first point, he maintains 
25 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

that religion means life, and relates to life 
as a whole, as well as to the whole life. In 
Germany certain phases of this thought 
have been emphasized separately, but never 
grasped comprehensively. With Kant reli- 
gion is a moral matter, and manifested in 
the individual as will. For Schleiermacher 
it was a matter of feeling, and showed itself 
in the emotions; while Hegel maintained 
that it was a form of intelligence. These 
elements, which have been separated in 
Germany, are for Bowne only different fea- 
tures of one thought. He would have 
religion embrace all forms of life together, 
and he maintains that it should influence 
and ennoble every act and thought. Hence 
it is impossible to base religion on any 
fixed doctrine. The fundamental beliefs 
underlying religion from the start should 
be maintained, but we must allow the 
development from time to time of new 
theologies. While fundamental truths are 
eternal, man is still developing, and conse- 
quently these eternal truths must be mani- 
fested in the different stages of man's de- 
velopment in different ways. 
36 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

These truths do not become new, but 
are newly presented. So we find in the 
education of children that the same truths 
appear to them in different lights as they 
grow up. True religion will change its 
theology, while the underlying ideas are not 
changeable. There has been too much ab- 
stract speculation apart from the concrete 
experiences of life, too much holding to 
abstract conceptions. Experience is the 
true teacher, and through her teaching we 
can grasp new thoughts and new views 
without endangering the eternal truths by 
abstract speculation. The old philosophy 
was established upon the universe as we 
understand it, and upon this doctrine was 
built up, and then life was explained ac- 
cording to that theory; whereas Bowne 
starts with life, out of which grows the 
world of experience, and upon this rests 
the doctrine, which must change as ex- 
perience changes. Another good thesis 
would be "Bowne's Definition of Life." 

James leads us back to the practical. So 
does Bowne, but with a different meaning, 
for with him, behind the practical stands 
27 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

the metaphysical. This is a new step in the 
development of philosophy. This "practi- 
cal" is not that which means useful, nor 
that which rests upon utilitarian grounds. 
Still another subject for a thesis would be 
"The Definition of the Practical as used by 
Aristotle and Later Philosophers, up to 
Bowne." This would help to define his 
position. I would particularly urge the 
study of Bowne's philosophy, as there is 
always danger lest tradition, which crystal- 
lizes soon after a man's death, may put his 
works in a wrong light. 

Bowne's contention is that the spiritual 
basis of life is not new, but it becomes new 
in its forms of development. God does not 
develop, but it is man that changes and 
develops. This is shown characteristically 
in the development of religious ideas; for 
instance, since mediaeval times, when the 
dogmas of Catholicism were universally ac- 
cepted. The study of theological develop- 
ment as a manifestation of religion in the 
varied experiences of humanity cannot but 
bring all views and doctrines into a clear 
and healthy relation to one another. 
28 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

Our second point refers to the relation of 
ethics to religion, upon which we have al- 
ready touched. Bowne, differing from the 
men of the Illumination period, as well as 
from Kant, declares that religion is dis- 
tinctly ethical, that ethics is the mere form 
of religion. Without the latter, ethics 
would have no life, content, or character, so 
that ethics depends wholly upon religion. 
We must not lose our bearings by a con- 
sideration of the ethical as such, but regard 
it as the medium through which religion 
shines and produces new life, and that the 
two exert a mutual influence. So Bowne 
would have us hold no harsh or crude ideas 
of God's relation to the world. Theologies 
of the past held that God created the world 
for his own glory. This was the severe and 
strict doctrine of the Jesuits, as well as of 
the Calvinists. Over against this Bowne 
would have us believe, with modern Chris- 
tians, that he created the world out of the 
fulness of his love. All religion and wor- 
ship would be a form of love, and would 
mean the worship of a loving Being, not of 
a tyrant. The Christian should be cheerful 
29 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

and joyous because his religion should make 
him so. We should be glad that God 
created the world and us, and that he will 
save us. 

The third point is one that needs em- 
phasizing, particularly among Protestants, 
who are apt to view religion too subjec- 
tively. Bowne urges that there are many 
ways of arriving at religion. There are 
some that have the experience of perceiving 
God's love all at once, whereupon a sudden 
change comes over the man's whole nature. 
Such persons are those whose temperament 
is susceptible to contrasts; but this is only 
one form of the manifestation of God, and 
quite dependent upon the individual. There 
are, on the other hand, many in whom this 
change takes place more quietly. We must 
only be sure of a complete turning about, 
and not judge of the manner, but of the 
results. Religion leads to lives, not to 
theologies, for it is based upon the funda- 
mental principles of life, and not upon 
temperament or environment. In these 
ideas of Bowne we find a reconciliation of 
opposing views, of earnest seriousness and 
30 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

happy enjoyment, of problems and con- 
flicts, combined with hope and joyous 
courage. We must sympathize with the 
many forms of life and experience, with the 
serious and the merry; and our children 
should learn that they may combine the 
liberty of freedom and the soberness of 
earnest effort, both in their mental and in 
their spiritual development. 

Dr. Bowne was a philosopher of America, 
and as such all America may be proud of 
him and of his memory. His strong per- 
sonality showed itself in such vigorous ef- 
fort; his humor was so happy and flashed 
forth so frequently in the midst of the 
most serious work, that moroseness and 
melancholy were impossible to him. He 
remained fresh and youthful in spirit to the 
end. Even in his last letter to me he seemed 
to be more than ever pervaded with a spirit 
of youth and joyous living. It is given us 
to say, as did Goethe of his friend Schiller, 
"He belonged to us." 



31 



PERSONALISM AND THE 



CHAPTER II 

THE CHANGING MOOD OF THE 
AGE 

Dominance of the Practical in 
Modern Life 

In a passage of the "Stones of Venice" 
Ruskin speaks of the high architectural 
beauty of the cathedral of Torcello, built 
by the Venetians as they took refuge from 
their pursuers, on the half submerged sand 
dunes of the Adriatic. He says, "The ac- 
tual condition of the exiles who built the 
cathedral of Torcello is exactly typical of 
the spiritual condition which every Chris- 
tian ought to recognize in himself, a state 
of homelessness on earth, except so far as 
he can make the Most High his habitation." 1 

A more recent writer, speaking of the 
present age, has said: "When man was 
doubtful if he would see to-morrow's sun- 

1 Stones of Venice, vol. ii. p. 13. 

32 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

rise, he built as if not dreaming of a perish- 
able home. To-day, when he cannot believe 
that death will touch him, and his orderly 
life stretches forward as an endless end of 
the world, he will leave for the amazement 
of future ages the Crystal Palace and the 
City Temple and the Peabody Building." 2 

These descriptions present by vivid con- 
trast the material basis of the changing 
mood of the age. Whatever men build, 
whether it be of brick and stone, institu- 
tions of government and civilization, or 
systems of thought and education, the 
sense of dependence upon the Eternal, the 
attitude toward the things not seen, will 
inevitably write itself into all their work. 

The outward and material circumstances 
of man's position on the earth will reflect 
themselves in his philosophy and dictate 
the mood of his thought. The age of grind- 
ing poverty, of elemental struggle toward 
freedom and knowledge, is always an age 
of f lith and optimism. The age of material 
fullness, when man seems to have almost 
within his grasp the secrets of the universe, 

2 Masterman, In Peril of Change, p. 170. 

33 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

the ultimate triumph over poverty, ig- 
norance, and the brute forces of nature, 
is the age when pessimism and despair 
range deepest. The human spirit is so 
constituted that when man must take up 
an heroic struggle, in which life and the 
most precious interests are daily put in 
jeopardy, his dreams and faiths exalt him 
to the skies. When these material things 
and the external forms for which he fought 
seem forever assured, he is plunged into 
doubt and morbid self-examination by his 
unsatisfied soul. 

To understand the philosophical mood of 
our own age it is necessary to keep in mind 
the dominating elements in our material 
progress. The prevalence of scientific in- 
vestigation and the growth of the scientific 
spirit have given us a hitherto unknown 
environment for our thought. With the 
mastery of physical forces the old horror 
of nature has passed. With it has gone a 
great deal that was merely tradition, preju- 
dice, and superstition. Beyond the borders 
of childhood we live in no magic world. 
Laws of nature are to us as an open book 
34 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

and in many minds the only book possessing 
any authority. Even the common man 
feels that he has deciphered, or will have 
deciphered for him in the near future, the 
last of nature's secrets. There is to be 
nothing left at which to wonder. We are 
amazed no longer at the vastness of the 
universe, at its marvelously interlocking 
processes, or at its hints of Final Purpose; 
but, rather, at ourselves that we know so 
much. In the spirit of Goldsmith's lines, 
we can say of man that 

Still the wonder grows 
That one small head can carry all he knows. 

The most startling discoveries in nature 
provoke but a momentary enthusiasm. We 
are masters of nature. 

With the pa'ssing of the old feeling toward 
nature has come a new acquaintance among 
the peoples of the earth. Nothing is per- 
haps more startling than the adoption by 
pagan and strange bloods of modern inven- 
tions, the latest philosophies and schemes 
of education. That which has been the 
product of generations of struggle is sud- 
85 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

denly appropriated by men of other races 
and civilizations. We are chagrined at the 
ease and adaptability at our own game of 
genius and invention of these strange and 
long-despised peoples. Whether we wish it 
or not, they represent mighty forces to be 
reckoned with. The overcoming of space 
and time sets them in our own dooryard. 
Tokyo, Peking, and Calcutta are nearer 
than London, Paris, and New York were 
yesterday. We are reminded of their 
thought in every review, of their deeds" in 
the morning paper, and we eat of their 
products at every breakfast table. A new 
world of human relationships has dawned 
upon us, in which we are burdened with a 
responsibility which we cannot escape. 

The resources of science have been put 
at the service of the industrial world. The 
discoveries of the past generation have 
revolutionized the world of commerce and 
labor. The comforts and luxuries of life 
have vastly increased. Great fortunes have 
resulted, and with them an overwhelming 
eagerness to discover the sesame of wealth. 
The contribution of science to this new 
36 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

world of material things has elevated scien- 
tific dogma into unquestioned power. The 
gravest criticism and deepest slur, that 
according to the average man can be cast, is 
the criticism and the slur of being unscien- 
tific. Little room is left for the aesthetic, 
the idealistic, or the spiritual. To such an 
age it has seemed, speaking in the words 
of Noyes's "Resurrection," that 

Love was too small, too human to be found 

In that transcendent source whence love was 
born; 

We talked of "forces": heaven was crowned 
With philosophic thorn. 

The demands made upon all departments 
of life have thus become intensely practical 
and utilitarian. What does it accomplish? 
How great are the returns? These are the 
questions that are constantly asked, not 
only in the world of economics, but also in 
the worlds of philosophy and religion. The 
demand of pragmatism is the demand of 
the modern spirit elevated into a test for 
truth. And this demand is not without its 
basis of sanity and justice. Men are 
37 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

wearied of theories and systems which ap- 
pear divorced from every practical interest. 
But too often the pragmatic question is 
made so individualistic and so fragmentary 
that truth becomes a mere utility for the 
moment and occasion only. 

To all of this is added the feeling that in 
our fullness and material prosperity we have 
no need to be comforted either by phil- 
osophy or religion. The former contents 
itself too largely with the explanation of 
the material, and the latter approaches an 
unredeemed world with a timidity that 
leaves no place for authoritative appeal. 
The indecision and blindness of a great 
multitude is voiced in Swinburne's "Watch 
in the Night": 

I halt and hearken behind 

If haply the hours will go back 

And return to the dear dead light, 

To the watch fires and stars that of old 

Shone where the sky now is black. 

The Struggle for Unity 
The main streams of philosophic thought, 
materialism, and idealism have run their 
38 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

course, and neither has been able to bring 
philosophic peace, except in the minds of 
their most extreme partisans. To the 
former has been given the popular role by 
reason of her close allegiance with practical 
science, and the inability of the average 
man to sense the problems that hedge her 
way. To common sense, all the ways of 
materialism are pleasantness, and all her 
paths are peace. The world is just what it 
appears to be. Material atoms are con- 
jured up to impinge upon nerves; and 
mind, thought, and purpose are the easy 
result of mechanical forces. Memory fol- 
lows the grooves plowed in the brain by 
yesterday's experience, while other mem- 
ories await the expectant call, filed carefully 
away, according to the best modern business 
methods, in their appropriate pigeonholes. 
When all is so easily imagined, he would 
seem to be only a fool who would question. 
In this system nothing is denied the im- 
agination and only the facts are wanting. 
On such a theory everything becomes as 
sun-clear, from the first accidental jiggling 
of atoms to the philosopher at the other end 
39 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

of the line, as the continuous juvenile 
tragedy of The House that Jack Built. Un- 
fortunately for the comfort of materialism, 
the barrenness of the supposed solution is 
coming to the attention of her own dis- 
ciples, and we have the old garment patched 
with the new cloth of pragmatism and 
Creative Evolutions. These reach the sol- 
emn decision that "universe" is a term of 
delusion and must yield to pluralism or at 
least to dualism. 

Nor has professional idealism been more 
fortunate in the endeavor to unite the 
sundered sides of consciousness. The world 
of materialism has been one in which matter 
was all and spirit nothing, but the world of 
idealism has been one in which the reality 
of matter has been altogether denied. She 
has been no more able to command men 
with authority than has her opponent. The 
material world bulks so large in the com- 
mon experience that it is ever difficult to 
convince men that 

The solid earth, the round sun, 

And all the visible world of sight and sound. 

Are but the phantasmagoria of a dream. 

40 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

Thus the ancient battle between ma- 
terialism and idealism has raged since the 
days of the Greek philosophers, and not 
until our own generation have the con- 
flicting arguments been sufficiently sifted 
and analyzed to show that neither bald 
materialism nor absolute idealism can pre- 
sent a possible solution to the enigma of 
the universe. 

The Present Crisis 
We have to-day the natural successors of 
idealism, who cling to the thought of unity, 
thrust out by time and criticism from the 
ancient peace of an absolutism whose only 
ultimate reality is the divine Spirit, hard 
pressed to answer the problem of evil. If 
all we see is the manifestation of the Divine, 
whence comes evil in the world? This is 
the insistent question cast at the spokes- 
men of idealism. Thinking men are impa- 
tient of any denial of the reality of pain, 
evil, or sorrow, in an effort to save the 
character of God. The sense of suffering 
and injustice is more acute than ever in 
the history of the world. A God that will 
41 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

cause suffering, pain, and evil they will 
repudiate. Even that human being seems 
a monster who will not do his best to alle- 
viate misery of every sort. How much 
more will they despise a Supreme Being so 
obtuse to moral responsibility as to create 
men for pain! The supreme question of 
the age for idealism as well as for Theism 
is how to maintain a Moral Causal Intelli- 
gence in the face of existent evil and 
suffering. 

It might be thought that, in view of these 
conditions, the way of the materialists would 
be easy. A cursory examination will show, 
however, that it is no longer possible for 
materialism to imagine that she speaks in 
terms of universe. Even the most obtuse 
materialist is to-day forced to admit a 
power and a reality, which, whether he 
knows or not, is not provided for in his 
system. He has before him the expedient 
of a dualism somewhat after the fashion of 
Mr. Bergson's, or he may resort with Mr. 
James to a pluralistic world. But such a 
universe falls more and more, the farther we 
search, into a disjointed and ever-dissolving 
42 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

individualism in which all realities disappear 
at the touch like Apples of Sodom. The 
lack of order and purpose is mistaken for 
freedom, and much dilated upon. The tum- 
brils daily cart the Theists to the slaughter 
in the interests of the new-found emancipa- 
tion, and there is not missing the grim joy 
of the populace at the effectiveness of the 
guillotine of freedom. Still there is ever 
present at the feast of joy a lurking Ban- 
quo's ghost of Purposive Intelligence that 
refuses to keep decently buried; the Great 
Perhaps, for which the heart of man cries 
out like a lonely child in the night. 

Just when we're safest there's a sunset touch, 
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 
A chorus-ending from Euripides — 
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears 
As old and new at once as nature's self 
To rap and knock and enter in our soul. 

The New Task of Philosophy 
The new task of philosophy is the recon- 
ciliation of these contrasting views. Much 
critical work has already been done which 
makes repetition unnecessary. There is a 
43 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

generally clear recognition of the real issues 
at stake. The individual mood toward one 
or the other side will greatly influence the 
result in any particular case, but yet there 
is reason to hope that we can come to an 
understanding of the issues involved, if we 
cannot unite in a common explanation. It 
is true that the old, old questions of the 
nature of reality, of Creative Purpose and 
evil, of unity or diversity, of freedom or 
necessity, will remain; but in the coming 
age we shall approach them from a new 
angle and see them in a new light. While 
we cannot expect to settle them, we may 
hope to work toward a solution. We may 
find a standpoint from which life may go 
on without despair or the eclipse of faith 
in the things of the spirit. 

In the realization of this new task of 
philosophy we believe that the future will 
have to reckon with the work of one of our 
foremost philosophers whom Rudolf Eucken 
is pleased to call a "world philosopher." 
His purpose was to show how the contrast- 
ing and apparently irreconcilable questions 
might find solution and common ground in 
44 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

the recognition of personality. Eucken de- 
clares that "we need something eternal to 
bind the different ages together, but this 
eternal has grown dim amid our doubts and 
struggles." 3 This is true for history and 
for individual thought as well. This need 
Bowne would meet with his doctrine of 
personalism. To show the implications of 
this theory with relation to the different 
phases of thought is the purpose of this 
volume. 

Because we believe that the case for 
faith has not been closed, nor its last word 
spoken, we come to the task in the mood 
of Swinburne's lines: 

The tides and the hours run out, 
And the seasons of death and of doubt, 
The night watches bitter and sore. 

Even the clamors and confusions of war- 
ring peoples will confirm the prophecy of 
our Lord, and be but the birth-pangs of a 
better world. The night ebbs away and 
across the hills lies the dawn. 

3 Christianity and the New Idealism, p. 38. 

45 



SECTION I 
NATURALISM 



CHAPTER III 

THE MODERN SPELL OF A GREEK 
PHANTOM 

The Ancient Dream of Material 
Unity 

Whatever it may imply, the human 
mind has ever shown a remarkable thirst 
to achieve unity. The apparent relation- 
ships in a world of great diversity make 
possible the belief that all things proceed 
from the same source. The world of things 
is assumed to be a universe and the mind 
of man has never been able permanently to 
rest in any other assumption. Unity is 
sought, whether in a material protoplasm 
from which all things have developed, or 
in a final ground of divine Thought or 
Purpose. Between the two ideas the philo- 
sophical world has been divided from early 
times into the opposing camps of material- 



PEKSONALISM AND THE 

ism and idealism. The search of the early 
Greek school was for this primal essence of 
things. Certain conclusions then reached 
have exerted an overwhelming influence in 
the scientific thought of our own age. It 
is interesting to glance at the movement in 
its beginnings. The great contribution of 
Greek philosophy to modern science was 
the theory that the material world is made 
up of atoms. With Leucippus, the founder 
of the theory, the atoms were countless, 
infinite in variety, imperceptibly small, hav- 
ing only the quality of filling space. They 
were in motion from eternity, and so held 
within them all the possibilities of pro- 
ducing the visible world. The importance 
of this theory for science lay in the fact 
that all qualitative differences could be ac- 
counted for by varying the quantities and 
combination of atoms. 

To the thoughtful it is at once apparent 
that with the materialist the atom is en- 
dowed with that magic and with those 
undiscoverable powers which the idealist 
ascribes to a World-Soul, or Divine Intelli- 
gence. In the case of the materialist the 
50 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

unaccountable powers of the fabled atom 
are overlooked in the beginning because 
they seem insignificant, yet when some real 
explanation is needed they are marshaled 
in such masses as to become suddenly 
visible, and sufficient to account for any 
result. Of course what has actually taken 
place is a flight of the imagination. Whether 
it has represented truly the order of nature 
we are left in confused doubt if we be un- 
imaginative souls. 

Protagoras added to the atomism of 
Leucippus the further doctrine that per- 
ception itself rests upon the motion of 
atoms, and that perceiving and thinking 
are psychologically identical. All percep- 
tions that come to us are true for us, just 
as they appear. Hence the famous maxim 
loved by the modern Humanist, "Man is 
the measure of all." Perceptions, under 
this scheme, are only relatively true. There 
can be no universal standard of truth. 
However, it must be noted that in this 
system perception is something other than 
the perceiving subject, and is likewise some- 
thing apart from the object perceived. This 
51 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

discrepancy, though apparent, remains un- 
answered. So soon in our search for ma- 
terialistic unity have we happened on a 
divided world. 

The Phantom of Form and Space 

With Democritus, the system of material- 
ism is at last in full flower. Observing the 
relativity of Protagoras' scheme of percep- 
tion, Democritus transcends it to assert the 
possibility of knowledge of the real through 
thought. Both Democritus and Plato were 
in this sense rationalistic, but Plato's ra- 
tionalism took an ethical turn. He sought 
the knowledge of the true Being as a means 
to virtue. His philosophy grew out of 
ethical need. With Plato perception ap- 
plies only to the corporeal world and can 
give opinions only. Thought, on the 
other hand, leads us to a higher and 
ultimate truth and knowledge of the True 
Being. 

Democritus kept to the way of material- 
ism. "Pure Form," with Plato, had been a 
general term corresponding to logical spe- 
cies, but Democritus meant by this term 
52 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

atom forms. To the motion of atoms lie 
refers perception and all mental activities 
whatsoever. The mind, or soul, or what- 
ever may be named as the perceiving sub- 
ject, consists of atoms which differ from 
other atoms only in fineness, as the atoms 
of fire were said to be finer than those of 
other substances. In a perceiving being the 
fire atoms were assumed to exist in about 
the proportion of one in three. By this 
simple and easy speculation was laid the 
basis of later materialism with its knowing 
and purposive monads, corpuscular attrac- 
tions and repulsions, atomic loves and hates, 
vital sparks and elans vitaux, which at least 
to the advocates of the system are suffi- 
cient to account for the world and all that 
dwell therein. "Thus the prejudice in favor 
of what may be perceived or imaged {an- 
schaulich), as if spatial form and motion 
were something simpler, more comprehen- 
sible in themselves, and less of a problem 
than qualitative character and alteration, is 
made the principle for the theoretical ex- 
planation of the world." 1 

1 Windelband, History of Philosophy, p. 111. 

53 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

Perpetuation of the Doctrine Through 
Epicurean and Stoic 

The theories of Democritus passed on 
through the Epicureans in so far as they 
involved atomism and mechanism. But 
Epicurus was weak in his conception of the 
necessary causation of mechanical forces. 
He differed from Democritus in denying 
altogether the existence of purpose in mat- 
ter. He held that the causeless deviation of 
atoms was sufficient to explain the worlds. 
Such a statement of the doctrine would have 
been of little use to the scientific age that 
was coming, but fortunately the Stoics pre- 
served that which the Epicureans lacked of 
Democritus' doctrine. Through their pan- 
theistic conception of the Deity as the 
"vital principle" they arrived at belief in 
an absolute causal necessity. Thus they 
continued that which the Epicureans had 
lost in the shuffle — the idea of a universal 
reign of law. 2 

When at last the long reign of Neoplaton- 
ism and scholasticism was ended by the 
shock of discovery and renaissance, it was 

2 Sc. Windelband, History of Philosophy, p. 183. 

54 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

the complementary ideas of mechanical cau- 
sation and reign of law that proved so 
potent to the new generation of scientific 
investigators. 

Revival and Development of the 
Doctrine in Modern Science 

The tool had been preserved, and was 
ready when the syllogistic form of reason- 
ing introduced by Aristotle had spent its 
force and had shown its inadequacy to 
deal singlehanded with practical problems. 
The world had grown tired of the weary 
round of dialectic. The reaction was for 
that reason all the more intense. But the 
tool was yet to be perfected. 

Bruno led the way by his conception of 
the monad, which in truly Hylozoistic 
fashion he endowed with potentiality. He 
affirmed the homogeneity of the universe, 
and declared that all qualitative determina- 
tions must be traced to quantitative changes. 

Bacon, casting off the rigors of scholastic 
method, declared that induction from par- 
ticular experiences is the only true method 
of science. 

55 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

Galileo contributed an insistence upon 
the application of the mathematical prin- 
ciple to scientific investigation, with this 
difference: instead of applying it to Being 
he applied it to Becoming, or change. Thus 
with his brilliant contemporaries he laid the 
foundations for modern astronomy. 

Descartes made a contribution of greatest 
importance in that while he insisted on the 
certainty afforded by induction, he also de- 
manded that the principle thus attained 
should by the method of composition afford 
explanation to the whole round of ex- 
perience. 

The Difficulty of Natuealistic 
Explanation 

Why, then, should we remain unsatisfied 
with a principle which in the material world 
has so proved its practical worth? Why 
should Greek atomism, lying at the basis of 
the modern discovery of nature, receive the 
unworthy title of "phantom"? For this 
reason: while it has furnished an invaluable 
method of procedure in investigation, its 
leading postulates are yet unproved. Many 
56 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

of them remain as much in the realm of the 
imagination as they did in the crude theories 
of the sixth century before Christ. The 
weakness of the supporters of naturalism 
has in the main been their inability to 
recognize the possible truth and value of 
the theory for physics, without reviving the 
ghost of ancient speculation and insisting 
that it has equal force for metaphysics. 

Whatever the attempt of materialism to 
explain life and mind, whether through the 
Hylozoistic endowment of atoms with sense 
or the hiding of the fact of self-directing 
personality under the verbiage of "states of 
consciousness," it can do no more than ex- 
plain half the world. For the thinking 
mind, burdened with the explanation of its 
own consciousness and volition, seeking to 
know its rightful place in the universe and 
to understand itself, the half world ex- 
plained by naturalism is the half that is 
least important. It needs ever to be kept 
in mind that knowledge of the laws of 
change, of precedence and sequence, while 
giving us sure ground on which to build our 
human expectations, tells us nothing of the 
57 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

essence of that which acts. As a method of 
science atomism is to be judged solely by- 
its value as a guide upon the road, not to 
metaphysical explanation, but to the human 
mastery of physical forces. It is good so long 
as it proves valuable, and only to that extent. 
Perhaps the most humorous thing in the 
history of philosophy— if humor can ever 
be said to invade so dreary a realm — is the 
attempt of naturalism to account for 
thought and will, decrying the vagueness 
and abstraction of the idealist, and at the 
same moment introducing into its concep- 
tion of the atom the illusory, magical, and 
abstract powers which it condemns in the 
God of its opponents. One inevitably re- 
verts to the picture of Faust traveling the 
Pharsalian fields in the Walpurgis Night, 
with Homonculus speaking to him out of a 
bottle. The materialist may prefer a God 
whose magic powers can all be confined in 
a test tube, but there will always remain 
some who cannot discover folly in believing 
in a God both immanent and transcendent, 
after the manner of Sidney Lanier, "My 
God is great, my God is strong." 
58 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 



CHAPTER IV 

THE EVADED PROBLEMS OF 
SPENCER'S PHILOSOPHY 

It would seem unnecessary to take much 
space for examination of the now generally 
discredited system of Herbert Spencer. Be- 
cause he was the spokesman for the natural- 
istic school; because he long held sway over 
the popular mind as the representative of 
scientific thinking; and because it was 
Bowne who early called attention to the 
metaphysical inconsistencies of his position, 
we enter here upon a brief discussion of his 
work. 

The naturalistic school itself now sees the 
untenability of Spencer's favorite positions. 
By no one of any school has he been more 
sharply arraigned than by Mr. Bergson. 
But this arraignment comes forty years 
after the clean-cut criticisms of the young 
Bowne. Bowne's criticisms were offered at 
59 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

a time when the empirical philosophy was 
both in physics and metaphysics in the 
ascendant. It was then an unpopular thing 
to venture criticism. Forgiveness was never 
accorded him in the minds of some for his 
sacrilegious daring in the presence of this 
idol of their thought. To take an attitude 
of criticism seemed at the time opposed to 
all that judgment and right sense science 
and reality dictated. The possession of 
clearer ideas by the philosophical world 
to-day upon the proper limits of scientific 
investigation is doubtless in some measure 
due to the pitiless criticism and construc- 
tive thought of Bowne. 

The Much-Known Unknowable 

One secret of Spencer's popularity lay in 
his apparent reconciliation of science and 
religion in a time of intense bitterness. He 
was essentially monistic, and yet, while 
yielding the claims of empirical science, 
seemed to leave place for a Divine Creative 
Power. It is true that he left to the reli- 
gious a poor sort of God, but at the mo- 
ment they were glad to be left anything. 
60 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

Spencer repudiated with warmth the charge 
of being a materialist and strove to keep 
his thought free from it. Nevertheless, the 
logic of his doctrine of mind inevitably 
landed him there, though unwilling and 
protesting. 

The loophole by which he hoped to admit 
the Divine Being, and so save the cause of 
religion, is the very one through which the 
Purposive Intelligence is compelled to make 
his escape from the system. To admit God 
at all was to make him so vaguely indefinite 
as not to be able to interfere with the 
natural world. Relieved of this responsi- 
bility, there was nothing left that was of 
any consequence to our thought of the 
Divine. 

Spencer declared for the phenomena of 
experience as the only source of knowledge. 
When we go back of these we hit at once 
upon the absolute, are lost in an infinite 
regress, and are told that the absolute can 
never be a cause. Concerning this absolute 
we can make no affirmation, and, therefore, 
he applies to it the term "Unknowable." 
Thus he seems at first to be determined to 
61 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

confine himself to the actions and interac- 
tions of the phenomenal world, and science 
and religion seem placed on an equal foot- 
ing regarding the Unknowable. As soon, 
however, as religion has been consigned to 
the region of pure mystery we discover a 
strange and unaccountable activity in the 
Unknowable. We were told to reject reli- 
gious assumptions regarding the Unknow- 
able because they involved an infinitude of 
time, which was unthinkable. Once we are 
well freed from the religious realm, how- 
ever, we are no longer to be constrained by 
such considerations. We begin to be able 
to affirm many things of the Unknowable. 
In the words of John Stuart Mill, which 
Bowne was fond of quoting, we begin to 
possess "a prodigious amount of knowledge 
concerning the Unknowable." We find that 
it is omnipresent in time and space; that it 
is related to the system of experience; 
"Coexistences and sequences in experience 
point to coexistences and sequences in the 
fundamental reality." We learn that the 
Unknowable is subject to time and change; 
that it is one, eternal, power, reality, the 
62 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

cause of phenomena, persistent, and inde- 
structible, "The infinite and eternal energy 
on which all things depend and from which 
all things forever proceed." Though we 
have not been allowed to affirm anything 
of the Unknowable for religious faith, yet 
such affirmation becomes the mainstay of 
the system of physics. In the religious 
realm we were ordered to reject all con- 
clusions requiring an infinitude of time, but 
in the physical realm we are commanded to 
invoke such an infinitude in order to ac- 
count for the system. We are to pass to 
this by affirming an indestructibility of 
matter, and an ever-persistent force, which, 
indeed, phenomena will not enable us to 
prove, but which we must imagine. 

It is true that Spencer tries to save the 
absolute, after having banished it from his 
kingdom, by saying that we have an in- 
definite consciousness of it. Examination 
shows that an indefinite consciousness is 
worth nothing for any practical purpose, is 
nothing more than a form of words. We 
feel again as Wordsworth expressed him- 
self: 

63 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

I'd rather be 
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lee, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn. 

The Little-Known Reality 

A similar negativing indefiniteness at- 
tends Spencer's account of reality. We 
have seen how unsafe and improper he 
considers it to affirm anything like per- 
sonality or purpose of the Unknowable. 
Inasmuch as the fundamental reality bulks 
back on the Unknowable, we can affirm 
nothing except certain coexistences and se- 
quences which are witnessed in phenomena. 
All knowledge is thus made relative to the 
individual who perceives in any given case. 
There is, indeed, no power assigned by 
which the individual can recognize simi- 
larity in phenomena, or reason from indi- 
vidual experiences to general laws. Memory 
is unaccounted for because no personality 
is provided to relate "faint states of con- 
sciousness." Dependent, as we are, upon 
an Unknowable of which we can affirm 
nothing, it is difficult to see how we can be 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

certain at all that there is a world of things 
corresponding to our perceptions. 

At this point he meets, according to 
Bowne, with a double problem. He is 
forced to rescue science from the skeptical 
conclusions of his know-nothing argument. 
At the same time he is compelled to state a 
doctrine of phenomena and of knowledge 
which will provide a foundation for science 
and save his system from materialism and 
atheism. To escape agnosticism he calls 
back the cashiered and discredited notions 
of matter, force, motion, time, and space, 
treating them as if there had never been 
any doubt of their standing and making 
them the foundation on which to build. 

The other half of the problem he meets 
by asserting the relative nature of reality, 
defining it as "persistence in consciousness." 
Reality is, then, the effect produced in us 
by the fundamental reality, or the Un- 
knowable. In this case Bowne raises a 
question. Would the Unknowable be able 
to do anything in our absence? If so, then 
these relative realities are something more 
than effects in us, and the definition is 
65 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

inadequate. If the relative realities do not 
exist in our absence, then reality is a mere 
subjectivity, as illusive as a dream. 

Spencer makes his final appeal to the 
claims of the persistence of force and the 
indestructibility of matter. By persistence 
of force he declares himself to mean "the 
persistence of some cause that transcends 
our knowledge and conception." Thus we 
are brought back as a last resort to the 
much-known Unknowable about which we 
can affirm nothing. The assumed law of 
the indestructibility of matter would seem 
likewise insufficient as a basis for a doc- 
trine of phenomena. It may be sufficiently 
accurate as a working basis in the physical 
realm, but it cannot be accurately demon- 
strated even there. In the case of the 
wedge or the lever we determine the exact 
amount of power, resistance, friction, and 
heat, and on paper write an equation which 
is sufficiently correct for practical purposes. 
But, speaking with the exactitude required 
by a law of indestructibility, there are losses 
in the process that we cannot compute nor 
include. Our equation is an approximation 
66 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

of the fact. We speak of the transmutation 
of friction, weight of falling water, or energy 
of steam into electrical power, light, or 
heat, and can come sufficiently near for 
practical purposes, but along the way much 
has to go unaccounted for. We cannot 
turn the processes backward and get the 
first terms of our equation. In other words, 
science can secure a practical working basis 
after the law of indestructibility. It cannot 
do more. 

In the end we find that Spencer cannot 
meet his problem without assuming for his 
persistence of force and indestructibility of 
matter that very infinitude of time against 
which he has warned us in the religious 
realm. He cannot prove these laws in any 
given case, but he can imagine that they 
might be true if they were given an infinite 
time in which to work. 

The Theory of Evolution 

Spencer's theory of evolution, though not 

originating with him, and advanced first in 

the early Greek philosophy, was the part 

of his system which gave him the widest 

67 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

reading and popularity. In his statement 
of the theory we find much philosophical 
unsoundness. 

The main support of his definition of 
evolution lies in his dependence upon the 
fallacy of the universal. This is the fallacy 
which vitiates general statements and makes 
for half-truths. It is a part of the busy- 
body's statement, "Every one is saying," 
when the exact truth is that the busybody 
is saying. If we can multiply atoms suffi- 
ciently to make impossible the tracing of 
any individual atom, and can multiply to 
an indefinite length the time in which they 
have to work, we can observe without 
wonder any imagined result. The point at 
issue is further lost in the words with which 
Spencer covers up the gap from the inor- 
ganic to the organic, from organic to 
sentient, from sentient to reasoning being. 
This is done by employing a word in 
slightly different senses, and so the gulf is 
bridged, linguistically speaking. But never 
yet hath eye seen nor ear heard how or 
when one single atom was led across the 
gulf to become a living soul. 
68 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

Moreover, if we are compelled to assume 
with Spencer the logical equivalence of 
cause and effect, the definition has no 
meaning. If I must say of any effect that 
all of its elements were already contained 
in its cause, the passing from one to the 
other is no progress. It cannot explain the 
elements of novelty which enter in. It 
would certainly be inadequate to explain 
the emergence of the present world from 
the original dance of atoms. Mr. Bergson 
has directed his sharpest shafts at this con- 
ception of evolution. He compares it to 
putting together a puzzle picture, all the 
parts of which have been previously fitted 
and prepared, and then with childish im- 
agination assuming that a creative progress 
has been made. 

The Definition of Life and Mind 

It is Spencer's doctrine of mind that ex- 
poses the materialistic trend of his phil- 
osophy. Judged from his doctrine of mat- 
ter, Spencer rightly claimed not to be a 
materialist. Judged from his doctrine of 
mind, materialism was his inevitable goal. 
69 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

According to the statement of the evolu- 
tion formula, life is to be denned in terms 
of matter and motion. These in turn are 
but the symbols of the Unknowable. Here 
Bowne calls attention to the fact that the 
atoms may be chemically regrouped, and 
can also be summoned forth in sufficient 
numbers to cause considerable masses. 
Bowne asks, however, what chemical dis- 
tribution can be made which will be more 
than a distribution or combination of 
chemicals. So long as it is a chemical com- 
bination it can be resolved into its con- 
stituent elements. Borrowing a word from 
the biological realm to cover the dis- 
crepancy between chemical atom and living 
protoplasm is not an actual but a verbal 
process. We are not told how matter or 
motion becomes something essentially dif- 
ferent — that is, a living organism. 

In like manner, in his theory of mind 
Spencer is satisfied with bridging verbally 
the gap between an affection of the nerves 
and a consciousness of the external world. 
He does this by asserting a double face to 
all nervous action. But it is useless to talk 
70 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

of a double-faced character for nervous ac- 
tion. We would still be bound to explain 
how an affection of the auditory nerve can 
be more than pleasurable or painful, soft 
or harsh, faint or vivid. Whence comes 
the mental content? There must be some- 
thing more than the affection of a nerve, 
or I should not recognize the voice I hear 
as my mother's, to say nothing of the 
attendant thought and memory which stir 
into consciousness all the springs of loyalty 
and affection. How shall I judge whether 
a sharp affection of my nerves is the 
"Soldier's Chorus" or a toothache? The 
"face" of nervous action by which I come 
to knowledge tells me nothing about the 
other "face" at all, but speaks directly of 
that outside world which impinges upon 
consciousness. If I say the effects pro- 
duced in me are only the attendants upon 
certain nervous affections, I have yet to 
show how I can consider my consciousness 
a true picture of what I seem to see. I 
must further explain how in this system of 
fleeting experiences, the factors of ex- 
perience are by good fortune related each 
71 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

to each, or how the memory of yesterday 
can persist with any real meaning for 
to-day. 

We are shut up to a world of nervous 
action. The structure that we build thereon 
is without common validity or verification. 
With or against our wills, if we cling to 
Spencer's system, we come to haven in a 
universe purely materialistic, from which 
even the Unknowable is powerless to save 
us. 



72 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 



CHAPTER V 

BOWNE AS AN ANTAGONIST OF 
NATURALISM 

All Philosophical Values Hinge on 
the Definition of Reality 

The real import of any system of thought 
eventually rests with its doctrine of reality. 
In regard to the nature of reality we have 
noted the two great antagonistic streams of 
thought. Under the first category are in- 
cluded those thinkers who assume matter 
as the basal reality. It makes little dif- 
ference whether they proceed upon the 
theory of magical and metaphysical atoms 
endowed with energy, motion, and force, 
or whether they conceal the metaphysical 
drift of their arguments by the assumption 
of vital impulses, reactions, affinities, selec- 
tion, or what not. In the end the sufficiency 
of all such theories will be found to lie in the 
ignoring of a part of the problem. Disaster 
is avoided only by refusal to carry the 
73 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

problem to its logical conclusion. Such is 
the end of all materialism. 

Plato attempted to meet the tide of ma- 
terialistic thought by raising the barrier of 
ideal knowledge. To him the universal was 
the true reality. The universally true was 
forever beyond the cavil or denial of indi- 
viduals. He thus erected in thought an 
idealism that through Neoplatonism pro- 
foundly influenced Christian theology for 
centuries. 

Aristotle, his pupil, noted the impassable 
gulf in Plato's world between the ideal and 
the actual and attempted to bridge it. He 
declared that reality could not exist as a 
general term, but must be found in con- 
crete and particular instances. As Aristotle 
labored to bring together the universal and 
the particular, and to let the Platonic 
idealism down to earth, so Bowne aimed to 
join the sundered sides of philosophic 
thought. Knowing the importance of the 
doctrine of reality to the future implica- 
tions of his system, he stated his definition 
with unusual care. Reality with Bowne was 
active and causal, that which can act or be 
74 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

acted upon. He thus made possible the 
assumption of the reality of thought with- 
out falling prey to the phenomenalism of 
the absolute idealist. 

The naturalist, by assuming an atomic 
causation for all mental perception, invests 
each idea, right or wrong, with fundamental 
validity. He leaves no room, either, for the 
substantiation of mental possessions that 
come by the way of reflection. He is not 
only faced by the problem of error; he is at 
loss to account for all reflective knowledge. 

From the opposite direction, the absolute 
idealist encounters difficulty with the prob- 
lem of evil. If thought in man is simply a 
reflection of God's thought, the burden of 
all evil and malicious thinking, error, su- 
perstition, and baseless fears is laid upon 
the Infinite Mind. 

Now if, as with Bowne, the essence of 
reality is simply causal activity, no such 
difficulties arise. The world of things de- 
pends upon the causal activity of a Divine 
Personality. The mutual relations and in- 
teractions of the world spring from the 
unity of the Supreme Will. The mind of 
75 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

man grasps a true world because both 
thinker and thing are included in the one 
creative harmony. We have an inkling of 
how this may be in the causal efficiency of 
the human personality, which is able to 
penetrate matter and to make matter con- 
form to it. This may, indeed, be a great 
mystery to the materialist, but it is a 
truth which no man can doubt without the 
overthrow of confidence in the reality of 
his own experience. 

It might seem that while Bowne has by 
this process escaped the problem of error, 
he has not been so fortunate with the 
problem of evil. And yet the problem of 
evil, that crux of theism, as the problem of 
error is the nightmare of materialism, 
ceases to maintain so great a tyranny. Dr. 
Bowne would have been far from claiming 
for his system the solution of the problem. 
But under the order of Personalism evil is 
no longer the necessary expression of the 
fundamental reality, nor is it loaded upon 
the Divine Will. It is, rather, an attendant 
upon the granting of freedom to responsible 
human personalities, it being more dear to 
76 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

the Divine to secure moral character than 
to create an otherwise perfect but morally 
irresponsible world. It is at least thinkable 
that to a God of moral capacity an unmoral 
world would be imperfect. If at the end 
of long disciplines he can bring mankind 
up to a moral perfection that is true because 
voluntary, might that not be the perfect 
world that should satisfy the divine 
thought? This mingling of human and 
divine personality and purpose has been 
thus beautifully expressed by Alfred Noyes 
in his poem "Creation": 

When he is older he shall be 

My friend and walk here at My side 
Or — when he wills — grow young with Me, 

And, to that happy world where once We died, 
Descending through the calm, blue weather, 

Buy life once more with our immortal breath, 
And wander through the little fields together, 

And taste of Love and Death. 

Is God Immanent Mover or Prime 

Mover? 

Naturalism can secure nothing more than 

a phenomenal world. If the stirring of 

atoms gives us perception, and chemical or 

77 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

molecular change in the cells of the brain 
is alone responsible for ideas, we are still 
at loss to explain how molecular changes 
can give us thought and a knowledge of 
the world of relations. What we really 
have is an affection of the nerves. When 
we attempt to reason from these nervous 
affections to a world of relations we have no 
reason to assume that we have more than 
phenomena. We have no means of proving 
our world to be a real one. The reason is that 
moving from the materialistic standpoint we 
have not assumed a ground sufficiently in- 
clusive to take in the thinker and the thing. 
We are at an equal loss on the naturalis- 
tic plane to trace effects to a first cause. 
We cannot follow the series far until we 
discover that we are involved in an infinite 
regress. Each effect demands a preceding 
cause. The earliest cause becomes more 
troublesome for explanation than the latest. 
In despair we may be led to affirm with 
Spencer that the first cause is the Unknow- 
able. Then we are compelled to face the 
question of how the knowable can spring 
from the unknowable. Aristotle attempted 
78 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

to solve this deadlock by positing a Divine 
Will as the Prime Mover. 1 Such a world 
would find its unity in a primal impulse, 
but would fall victim to a doctrine of 
necessity only less rigid than that of 
naturalism. Bowne meets this problem by 
assuming that the fundamental causal ac- 
tivity is not a Prime Mover, but an Imma- 
nent Mover continually manifesting himself 
in the on-going of the world. Such a con- 
ception does not conflict with the laws of 
natural science, for Bowne draws a careful 
distinction between phenomenal and effi- 
cient causality. Natural science is built 
upon the laws of sequence in phenomena. 
We can affirm the order in which events will 
occur without making any metaphysical as- 
sumptions at all. The efficient cause of the 
action and interaction of the natural order 
is the Divine Personality establishing his 
own laws of procedure. 

The Personality of the World-Ground 

At this point we find Bowne going beyond 

the thought of Aristotle to affirm personal- 

1 Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book xi, chap. vii. 

79 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

ity in the Divine Being. This thought 
would have been repugnant to Aristotle, but 
his failure to affirm it made impossible the 
maintenance of a moral order and of per- 
sonal immortality. This fact is most clearly 
brought out by Eucken. He says: "Aris- 
totle affirms the existence of a transcendent 
Deity as the source of reason, and as the 
origin of motion, which from eternity to 
eternity pervades the universe. But he 
denies to this Deity any activity within the 
world; concern with external things, not to 
say petty human affairs, would destroy the 
completeness of the Deity's life. So God, 
or pure intelligence, himself unmoved, 
moves the world by his mere being; any 
further development of things arises from 
their own nature. Here, accordingly, there 
is no moral order of the world, and no 
Providence. Likewise there can be no hope 
of a personal immortality.' 

In contrast with Aristotle, Bowne de- 
clares that "Causal explanation must be in 
terms of personality or it must vanish 
altogether." This view is strictly in accord 

* The Problem of Human Life, p. 47. 

80 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

with all that we know of causation. Prece- 
dences and sequences in phenomena could 
give to individual atoms no knowledge of 
the meaning of the processes of which they 
are a part. Phenomenal causes would be 
confined to the effects which they them- 
selves produced, and in any case we would 
be forced to an infinite regress. In human 
personality alone we have introduced into 
experience of causation that which is an 
uncaused cause of phenomena. The human 
personality, being able to relate a succession 
of causes and effects to itself, and standing 
outside the mechanical circle, becomes meas- 
urably an efficient cause. But the human 
personality in order to preserve the in- 
tegrity of its own thought bulks back on an 
eternal thinking Personality through which 
it finds its synthesis with the world of 
things and persons. Thus the human per- 
sonality, introducing an unaccounted factor 
into the realm of nature, gives a hint of the 
place of the Divine Personality in this 
order. If this uncaused and purposive per- 
sonal element be left out, we can have no 
efficient causation and no real progress. On 
81 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

the impersonal plane the effect must be 
already contained in the cause, and there 
can be no progress. To say that the effect 
is only potentially contained in the cause 
is to introduce the new factor surreptitiously 
under the cover of a word. Any World- 
Ground capable of real causation, not itself 
involved in the atomic flux, must be per- 
sonal as well as intelligent. 

Is Freedom Possible in the Natural 
World? 

As has already been pointed out, any 
system of mechanical explanation falls in- 
evitably into difficulty with the problem of 
evil, as well as with the problem of error. 
If all thinking and action is caused by 
atomic motion, then we are bound to a 
system of necessity, and moral action be- 
comes impossible. The criminal in his 
crime is then simply fulfilling the necessary 
result of affections of his nerves. He is 
much to be pitied, but not at all to be 
blamed. Every sort of error and ex- 
travagance is given an equal footing with 
truth and sanity. Only a little reflection 
82 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

serves to show how deeply this theory 
would cut into every demand of the moral 
order. 

By positing all causal efficiency as arising 
from personality, place is left for the 
existence of error and evil without offending 
the human sense of moral obligation or 
erecting error into the plane of truth, or of 
burdening the Deity with responsibility for 
evil. It is impossible to explain the prob- 
lem of evil in any general way that will give 
satisfaction, because man is a moral being 
and so constituted that the existence of 
evil is forever an offense; and because, 
further, the problem can be met only on 
the arena of action and solved only in the 
individual life. It is possible to hold such 
a view as not to offend the most treasured 
instincts of the heart. This Bowne has 
done by reason of his definition of reality 
and by the assumption of personality in 
the World-Ground. 



83 



SECTION II 
IDEALISM 



CHAPTER VI 
THE KANTIAN STARTING-POINT 

Has the Mind a Task in Experience? 

Kant's great contribution to the world 
of thought was his discovery that the 
mind has a task in experience. He affirmed 
truly when he declared that his work would 
make as great a change in the outlook of 
philosophy as had the discoveries of Coper- 
nicus in the field of astronomy. 

Hitherto the mind had been regarded as 
the passive recipient of impressions, a tablet 
on which the world of external things could 
write itself. Kant showed that every ex- 
perience was due to the constitutive ac- 
tivity of the mind itself, as well as to the 
impressions of the outside world. Time and 
space had been conceived as fundamental 
realities which could exist apart from all 
intelligence. He aimed to show how they 
were but the forms under which the think- 
ing mind relates the world of things and 
events to itself and to each other. This 
87 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

power of the mind to bring a real contribu- 
tion of its own to experience will be ap- 
parent if we consider how the world of 
nature yields a decidedly richer content to 
the biologist than to the man ignorant of 
her processes. She speaks to the trained 
mind a thousand things unnoticed by the 
untrained, and every addition to the mental 
capital increases the synthesizing power of 
the beholder. 

That space is a necessary form of think- 
ing, an intuition rather than an acquirement 
of experience, is to be illustrated in many 
ways. In dreams, though there is no actual 
space, the mind works under the space form. 
In traveling distances during the uncon- 
sciousness of sleep, and even for places 
never seen, the mind proceeds to construct 
ideas of them under the form of space. 

Time is likewise a law of intelligence 
rather than an entity in itself. As space is 
the form under which we relate a world of 
diversity to ourselves and each other, so 
time is the form under which we relate the 
world of experiences to the abiding self. 
Without this contribution of the self which 
88 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

survives the changes there could be no 
sense of time. In other words, it is because 
there is an element of timelessness in the 
thinker that he gets the idea of the passage 
of time. Time being the form under which 
intelligence acts, the mind by its own con- 
stitutive activity is able to grasp and assign 
a meaning to historic periods of which ex- 
perience could tell it nothing. 

The weakness in Kant's position lay in 
the fact that he took account only of the 
subjective side of this activity of the mind. 
It is well enough for me to say that time 
and space are only the forms under which 
I think, but are they peculiar to me? Do 
they not exist apart from my thinking? 
How may I be sure that the time and space 
which I think will correspond to that which 
others think? Kant's failure to answer these 
questions vitiated his system. It becomes 
at once apparent that both time and space 
must possess some objective validity to free 
them from the disjunctive caprice of the 
individual and make possible a world united 
in space and time relations. This Kant did 



89 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

"We cannot impose mental forms upon 
the world of experience unless that world 
itself be adapted to those forms." 1 

It is interesting to note how Bowne, 
affirming the ideal nature of space and 
time, yet avoided the logical impasse to 
which Kant was brought. Bowne was too 
close to the practical in his thinking not to 
see that the forms of time and space must 
be true for the object of thought as well as 
for the thinker. To him space and time 
gain a validity which makes them universal 
for all intelligent beings through a Supreme 
Personal Intelligence who creates and up- 
holds all. The world of things and of intel- 
ligences correspond each to each because all 
are comprehended in a Supreme Intelligence 
from which they acquire their meaning and 
reality. 

Where Can We Find a Permanent 
World? 

Of course Kant was not blind to the 
necessity of asserting somewhere an objec- 
tive validity. He clearly saw that a purely 
subjective world would be one in which 

1 Bowne, Kant and Spencer, p. 150. 

90 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

every man would make his own world and 
no two worlds would correspond. It was 
necessary to point out some principle that 
w T ould possess permanence and give unity. 
This permanent principle he attempted to 
introduce under what he called the analogies 
of experience. 2 In this portion of the 
Critique Kant becomes perilously involved 
in his search for the permanent in phe- 
nomena. To find this principle of per- 
manence he all but affirms an independent 
and back-lying existence for things in 
themselves. To the mind of Bowne the 
problem of permanence could never be 
■solved in this crude fashion. "On the im- 
personal plane there is no possibility of 
combining permanence with change, least 
of all by a mere analysis of the notion of 
change. On that plane we cannot reserve 
anything in the world of change as an 
abiding element, for as soon as it becomes 
changeless it no longer explains change, and 
when it explains change it passes into the 
changing, and changes through and through. 
The problem here can be solved only as we 

2 Kant, Critique, tr. by Miiller, p. 144. 

91 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

carry it up to the plane of personality, and 
find the permanence of experience in the 
world of meaning and in the self-conscious 
intelligence which founds and administers 
the world of meanings under the forms of 
change." 3 

What Lies Behind the Appearance of 
Things? 

The same subjectivity that oppressed 
Kant in the consideration of time and space 
troubled him likewise in his attempt to find 
the abiding real. This difficulty was in 
part due to his failure to discriminate be- 
tween two possible definitions of the term 
"subjective." We may mean by the term 
that which is peculiar to the individual 
alone, or we may mean that which is true 
for intelligence anywhere and has no exist- 
ence apart from it. If Kant had kept this 
truth in mind when affirming the subjec- 
tivity or phenomenal nature of reality, all 
might have been well. But failing to draw 
the distinction, he made the system of ex- 
perience the fiction of the individual. Kant's 

3 Bowne, Kant and Spencer, pp. 99, 100. 

92 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

only escape would have been to affirm a 
back-lying and independent Cause. It was 
only thus he could have saved his system 
from solipsism. Phenomena are not masks 
or appearances of any kind, existing only 
for the individual. They are the things 
that exist for human intelligences every- 
where and derive their common meaning 
through a supreme intelligence by which 
they exist. We apprehend them through 
our own intelligence, but they do not de- 
pend upon our intelligence for their exist- 
ence; and since they must depend upon 
intelligence for existence, it only remains 
that we affirm a back-lying intelligence as 
their cause and presupposition. 4 

But Kant does not discover the high road 
out of his subjectivism. For him things in 
succession imply causal relations, and as the 
causal relations in things must be something 
independent of the mind of the onlooker, 
there must be in phenomena a residuant 
reality beyond that which the mind is able 
to perceive. Thus he has resort to a doc- 
trine of noumena. The end of this way is 

4 Bowne, Kant and Spencer, p. 124. 

93 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

an impossible dualism, for it erects a 
reality which is not only independent of 
individual intelligence, but which is beyond 
all intelligence, being of a different and un- 
knowable nature. This dualism into which 
Kant unwittingly falls is to be avoided by 
distinguishing between causal and phenom- 
enal reality. Phenomenal reality is the 
noted succession of appearances, common to 
all. We can mark the preexistences and 
successions which universally hold in the 
world of experience, and we can formulate 
the law of their procedure without granting 
them a causal efficiency or saying anything 
about their metaphysical ground. Causal 
reality, in contrast, deals not with the order 
of succession, but with the ground of being 
itself. 

Can We "Prove" the World of Spirit? 

Kant's purpose was to prove that it is 
impossible from the common data of ex- 
perience to arrive at affirmations respecting 
God and immortality. He did this, not from 
hostility, but from friendliness to faith. 

Naturalism had shown the inadequacy of 
94 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

the so-called "proofs" of the Divine exist- 
ence. It went farther, for, assuming its 
ability to account for everything in heaven 
and in earth, it also asserted the non- 
existence of everything not dreamt of in its 
philosophy. What Kant did was to make 
room for faith by showing that religious 
convictions lie outside the province of the 
naturalistic speculation. It could neither be 
proved nor disproved on the basis of natural- 
ism. Kant thus claims the honor of over- 
throwing all materialistic and atheistic 
teaching by showing its attempt at religious 
explanation to be outside its possible field. 
The religious world of to-day has come to 
realize that there can be no "proofs" for 
God and immortality, in the sense that was 
so much sought after in Kant's day. We 
realize now that the great argument for 
God is the practical interest. We affirm 
the existence of God because he is a neces- 
sity for all sane thinking and his existence 
is demanded by the moral and religious 
interests of life. This practical argument 
possesses much more force for the present 
day than the old "proofs." What is said 
95 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

for the doctrine of God can likewise be said 
for immortality and all the fundamental re- 
ligious truths. They stand forever because 
they are written into the very nature of 
the human spirit. 

In his contention Kant was true to the 
facts. The apprehension of God is an act 
of faith. Spiritual truths are gained in the 
exercise of faith and the spiritual powers. 
Bowne, in a lecture commenting on Kant's 
showing of the impossibility of an intel- 
lectual demonstration of the existence of 
God, declared that the apprehension of God 
could be reached only by faith, and then 
added this significant word: "By way of 
mere speculation we cannot attain to dem- 
onstration in any field. There is no way 
of stopping where Kant stops." 

The outcome of Kant's "antinomies of 
thought" after verbose and tedious discus- 
sion is closely allied to this pragmatic 
judgment upon the deeper religious values. 

Bowne thus sums up his argument: "Con- 
viction must be reached in life itself, and 
this has always, with scantiest exception, 
led the race to theistic faith, not, indeed, as 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

something that can be speculatively demon- 
strated or against which any cavil or objec- 
tion is impossible, but something which 
represents the line of least resistance for 
human thought. The intelligent world 
points to an intelligent author, the moral 
world to a moral author, the rational 
world to a rational author. This is the 
conclusion which the race has drawn and 
the conclusion in which it increasingly rests, 
the conclusion which it holds with more 
and more confidence as the ground of all 
its hope and the security of its efforts, 
whether in the field of science and cogni- 
tion or of morality and religion. . . . As- 
suming the legitimacy of life and of our 
human instincts, we may ask ourselves what 
life implies; and Kant says it implies God, 
freedom, and immortality, as postulates 
without which the mind would fall into 
discord with itself and life would lose itself 
in inner contradiction. We may then hold 
these postulates, not as something given by 
the speculative reason, but as something 
rooted in life." 5 



5 Bowne, Kant and Spencer, pp. 212, 213. 

97 



PERSONALISM AND THE 



CHAPTER VII 

THE ABSOLUTE PHILOSOPHY, 
LOTZE AND BOWNE 

Is the World More than Knowledge? 

Lotze was the first to successfully refute 
the absolute idealism of Hegel. Neverthe- 
less, he was himself to be counted among 
the idealists. He hoped to harmonize the 
differences between modern scientific 
thought and that romantic idealism which 
had so largely characterized the meta- 
physics of the preceding generation. The 
interaction of things in an intelligible uni- 
verse was to him the best evidence of essen- 
tial unity between mind and matter. He 
believed that Hegel had indicated a great 
goal. He did not believe with Hegel that 
all truth can be deduced from reflection. 
It was Lotze's aim to grant perception, or 
empirical knowledge of nature, its place in 
thought. 

98 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

"His philosophy is a persistent defense of 
perception against reflection, of the concrete 
particular against pale and vacant general 
ideas; it is a powerful protest against in- 
justice to the individuality and uniqueness 
which he found at the core of every fact. 
Thought with its abstract conceptions and 
unsubstantial universals seemed to him poor 
and thin as compared with the facts and 
events of the real world; every general law 
seemed to him to fall short of reaching the 
core and essence of anything actual." 1 

In particular was Lotze opposed to the 
closed system of idealism where everything 
was so ordered in the eternal thought that 
there could by no possibility enter in any 
factors which had not already been de- 
termined before the world was, and which 
relegated freedom to the realm of shadow 
and make-believe. He believed that history 
was something more "than a translation in 
time of the eternally complete content of 
an ordered world." He concluded, then, 
that the world is something more than an 
eternal thought; that it contains a ca- 

1 Jones, Philosophy of Lotze, p. 9. 

99 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

pacity for freedom and a possibility for the 
introduction of the unique, which is an 
irresistible demand of the human spirit. 
By his incisive criticisms he laid bare the 
deceptive generalities of the extreme He- 
gelian position and made necessary a drastic 
modification of its thought. 

Of What Does Reality Consist? 
Hegelianism thought to reach reality by 
reflection and without the aid of experience. 
Lotze, on the other hand, held steadfastly 
to the importance of experience and main- 
tained that we can understand it only as 
we grasp its inner continuity. He raised 
the question of the ultimate nature of 
reality by asserting that in a united uni- 
verse of relations and correspondences ca- 
pable of being apprehended it must be either 
material or spiritual. If we are to allow 
the reality of anything outside matter, the 
conclusion is foregone — the ultimate nature 
of being is spiritual. But if we are to 
understand reality, we need to know more 
than the elements into which it is divisible, 
more than the laws under which it acts; we 
100 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

must know also its destination. Laws in 
themselves are nothing more than the for- 
mulated sequence of events, the tabulated 
data of experience. They can give us little 
concerning the ground of their activity. We 
must go back of the law to the apparent 
aim of the uniformity and therein catch a 
glimpse of the controlling purpose. Thus he 
introduces into his system the idea of value. 
He now proceeds to describe reality as the 
realized law of procedure. It is that in 
which the Infinite Purpose is realizing itself. 
So far Lotze has scarcely escaped the 
absolute idealism which he aimed to super- 
sede. His world of reality remains phe- 
nomenal in spite of his protestations. This 
phenomenalism he endeavored to avoid by 
looking toward the Good as the supreme 
end . " The ob j ecti vi ty of knowledge consists 
in this, that it is not a meaningless play of 
illusion, but that it presents to us a world 
whose several parts are linked and ordered 
according to the prescription of that which 
is alone real in the world, namely, the 
good." 2 

2 Quoted by Stahlin, Kant, Lotze and Ritschl, p. 141. 

101 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

Thus with Lotze the Supreme Good is 
the ultimate Reality in whose existence all 
other realities find their ground. 

Bowne's Debt to Lotze 
There are many well-defined correspond- 
ences between the systems of Lotze and 
Bowne. There are many points at which 
Bowne would gladly have owned his obli- 
gation to his teacher. An examination of 
these correspondences will be of moment 
to those who are interested in Bowne's phi- 
losophy. 

They were at one in the insistence upon 
the difference between the practical field of 
science and the speculative field of meta- 
physics, in which both hark back to Kant. 
They held that science is properly limited 
to the order of coexistence and sequence in 
phenomena with reference to the practical 
issues. To metaphysics alone is assigned 
the realm of efficient causality. The scien- 
tist may learn from experience with phe- 
nomena the laws of their action and 
interaction, but when he goes back of 
phenomena to discuss the nature of reality 
102 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

or being, he has left the realm of science 
for that of philosophy. 

Both discerned the folly of an attempt to 
understand nature simply by a method of 
classification. They called attention to the 
emptiness of such endeavors so far as the 
problem of reality is concerned. Classifica- 
tion is a method of intelligence the better 
to handle its materials. Classification in no 
wise changes the things classified or reveals 
their back-lying reality. 

Both philosophers pointed out the as- 
tounding claims of atomism to an efficiency 
which in the end would endow each separate 
atom with a purpose, wisdom, and knowl- 
edge of other atoms far superior to human 
intelligence, and with a proclivity for peace 
remarkable in this, that in a divided world 
of innumerable atoms there should be any 
working in relations at all. Instead of 
naturalism being free from the dark realm 
of magic and unaccountable powers, she is 
rather the high priestess of superstition with 
her powerful demiurges of atoms. 

They saw the impossibility of assuming 
the absentee God of absolute idealism. 
103 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

Such a God would find himself, at the best, 
working at cross purposes in a disjointed 
world, and gradually realizing his thought 
through the slow-struggling intelligence of 
man and accomplishing his own moral char- 
acter in the slower moving ebb and flow of 
the tides of human action. 

They saw that neither pluralism which 
springs from atomism nor the pantheism 
which springs from Absolutism was suffi- 
cient to explain the world and leave place 
on the one hand for individuality and on 
the other for freedom. 

They were alike in recognizing the ab- 
surdities which left Absolutism in the clouds. 
Lotze felt himself to be sufficiently definite 
when he referred everything to the Supreme 
Good. Bowne went on to declare that the 
world of experience can be maintained as 
real only as it is grounded in a Supreme 
Personality from whom all things forever 
proceed. 

Bowne possessed Lotze's view concerning 

the barren round of mechanical causation 

assumed by materialism, in which there can 

be no possibility of progress, no chance for' 

104 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

the introduction of unique factors of ad- 
vance. They were one likewise in recogni- 
tion of the- corresponding weakness of an 
Absolute who contained all in himself, and 
in whom was buried also all possibility of 
human freedom, that novelty that forever 
spells progress in the history of the indi- 
vidual and the race. 

Bowne's Advance on Lotze's System 
It is only fair to say that Bowne received 
many of the features of his system from 
Lotze. In the clearness of his critical 
faculties he was remarkably like Lotze. It 
is also fair to say that Bowne overcame 
the weaknesses inherent in Lotze's system 
and carried it out to a more logical con- 
clusion. 

In his definition of reality, Lotze is need- 
lessly vague. His shortest and most direct 
definition of reality is that it is the realized 
law of procedure. This definition points to- 
ward activism, but it is not thoroughgoing 
enough. Its reality is still phenomenal, 
existing only in the absolute purpose. What 
he was aiming for was a reality whose real- 
105 



PERSONALI8M AND THE 

ness lay in the very act of a Divine Purpose 
realizing itself. 

Bowne's definition of reality was not only 
more clear and simple, but also more pro- 
found. With him reality is that which can 
act or be acted upon. Thus he makes way 
for matter and mind and God. 

Lotze pointed out the fact that we must 
discover some continuity behind the ebb and 
flow of matter and even of human experience 
if we are to find out the meaning of the 
world. Bowne carried the thought up to 
secure footing and made the relation of 
thought and thing clear. He affirmed that 
the desired continuity can be found alone 
in personality. Personality is the only 
power of which we are conscious that can 
join the sundered experiences of time and 
space into a unity and look upon all from 
the standpoint of the one. Thus alone, he 
argues, is unity possible in the world. The 
universe finds its unity in the thought of a 
Supreme Personality, himself the unchang- 
ing cause of change. 

Thus Lotze's vague Purpose of the Su- 
preme Good, which he considers the funda- 
106 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

mental reality, gives way to a Person who 
is also the World-Ground. Both the ma- 
terial universe and the individual mind fall 
into step because both proceed from the 
same source. Our intelligences were made 
for the true understanding of the world. 
What the general mind reports is true be- 
cause the world was made for our intelli- 
gence. In this way the idea with which 
Lotze began was given a new and richer 
and more powerful content. 

If Lotze had thus completed his system, 
he would have been free from the criticism 
of one of the most skillful and friendly 
critics, who declared that his cardinal de- 
fect lay at this point. This writer says: 
"He may, like the ordinary consciousness, 
maintain the necessity of nature, and the 
freedom of men, and the omnipresence of 
God; he may give man all his own way, 
which is essential to morality, and God all 
His own way, which is essential to religion, 
and thus permit both these forces which 
mold the higher destinies of mankind to 
exist together. But he must also strive to 
reconcile them. Truth for him must not be 
107 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

a thing of aspects and phases merely; he 
must not agree with the common con- 
sciousness in its fragmentariness." 3 

Herein is the chief point of difference be- 
tween Lotze and Bowne. Lotze stops short 
of asserting personality of the World- 
Ground and leaves the fundamental reality 
only less vague than Hegel's absolute. 
Bowne presses on to the assertion of per- 
sonality in the World-Ground with all that 
such an assertion implies. He thus carries 
the metaphysical problem up into religion 
and is able thereby to bring about that very 
reconciliation between science and religion 
which was Lotze's own aim. 

Bowne's position is well disclosed in a 
passage in his last work touching the ideal- 
ist position, in which he says: "Being in 
this world is nothing more than having a 
certain form and type of experience with 
certain familiar conditions. Passing out of 
this world into another would mean simply 
not a transition through space, but passing 
into a new form and type of experience dif- 
ferently constituted from the present. And 

3 Jones, Philosophy of Lotze, p. 13. 

108 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

how many of these systems are possible or 
to what extent this change might go is 
altogether beyond us. Of course these many 
systems would all be objectively founded; 
that is, they would be rooted in the will and 
purpose of the Creator, and they would also 
be one in the sense that the creative purpose 
would comprise them all in one plan; but 
they would not be one in the sense of being 
phases or aspects of one absolute reality. 
They would be stages in God's unfolding 
plan, but not aspects of the static universe. 
This static universe is a phantom of ab- 
stract thought. The only reality is God 
and his progressively unfolding plan and 
purpose and work, and the world of finite 
spirits. In this case also we should have a 
relativity but not an illusion, a validity of 
knowledge within the sphere which finds its 
ground and warrant in the plan and pur- 
pose of the Creator." 4 

4 Bowne, Kant and Spencer, pp. 145, 146. 



109 



SECTION III 
PRAGMATISM 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE UNMETAPHYSICAL PRAGMA- 
TISM OF WILLIAM JAMES 

The Pragmatic Element in the History 
of Philosophy 

Protagoras is said to have been the 
originator of the watchword of pragmatism 
— "Man is the measure of all things." The 
phrase and the doctrine have unpleasant 
connections, however, for Protagoras and 
the Sophists to whose school he belonged 
meant thereby all that the word "sophism" 
has come to imply in modern life. In the 
words of Eucken, "Man the measure of all 
things," meant for them "A renunciation of 
all universally valid standards, a surrender 
of truth to man's momentary caprice and 
fluctuating inclinations. In other words, it 
implied that everything may be turned this 
way or that and differently judged, accord- 
ing to the point of view; that what appears 
113 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

as the right may be represented as the 
wrong, and conversely; and that any cause 
may be championed according to the neces- 
sities of the case or to one's whim. In this 
manner life is gradually degraded into a 
means of the profit, the self-indulgence, even 
the sport of the single individual, who 
acknowledges no restraints, feels no re- 
spect; . . . thus the good yields to the 
profitable; all valuations become relative. 
. . . Such a doctrine of relativity . . . 
raised to a sovereign position, . . . becomes 
the deadly enemy of everything great and 
true." 1 

The pragmatic movement came in Greece 
after the climax of her brilliant age had 
passed. The touch of disorganization and 
decay had struck into her civilization. Old 
faiths and old institutions were breaking 
before an incoming tide of individualism. 

That system which had such questionable 
origin with the Sophists became with the 
Stoics a judgment by moral values, and 
here perhaps reached its highest and noblest 
influence. It appears in the sensualistic 

1 Eucken, The Problem of Human Life, p. 14. 

114 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

system of Epicurus, to whom the criterion 
of truth becomes the sensation of pleasure 
as contrasted with pain. 2 

We again see the pragmatic postulate in 
the teachings of Pyrrho and the new acad- 
emy. They hold it as the foundation of 
knowledge. Arcesilaus named probabilism as 
the only rule of practical life. Carneades 
introduced the idea of degrees of proba- 
bility. To the eclectics, that was truth 
which appeared to be true. In the end, 
when both scientific and deductive truth 
have been rid of all reality, we reach the 
reaction of neo-platonism with its affirma- 
tion of truth by revelation alone. 

Modern pragmatism applies the thought 
of value, not primarily to the moral and 
aesthetic, as did the Stoics, but to reality 
itself. Davidson has called attention to the 
fact that the new element in modern prag- 
matism is to bring knowledge as well as 
aesthetics and ethics to the test of practical 
value. 3 The modern pragmatists do not by 



2 Compare Janet and Seailles, History of the Problems of 
Philosophy, p. 103. 

8 The Stoic Creed, p. 256. 

115 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

any means agree in the phase of the system 
which is most important. Mr. Pierce re- 
vived the name for modern philosophy. 
F. C. S. Schiller is interested in giving the 
movement a particularly subjectivistic turn. 
James has pursued the line of Realism. 
Because of the extended influence of the 
latter, and the commonness with which his 
name is associated with the term "prag- 
matism," we shall confine ourselves to the 
discussion of his particular system. 

Can the Pragmatic Test of Truth Be 
Maintained? 
In the chapter on "The Notion of Truth," 
in his volume on pragmatism, James justly 
balks at the vague abstractions of the defi- 
nition of truth given by the rationalists. 
He quotes Taylor's definition, "Truth is the 
system of propositions which have an uncon- 
ditional claim to be recognized as valid," 
and also Rickert's statement that "Truth is 
a name for all those judgments which we 
find ourselves under obligations to make by 
a kind of imperative duty." These defini- 
tions of truth James declares "unutterable 
116 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

triviality." While we sympathize with him 
in his revolt from any attempt at making 
truth a mere abstraction, we cannot be 
blind to the commission of the same error 
of abstraction by James himself when he 
substitutes "verify-able" for "verify-cation" 
under exigency. What both James and his 
rationalist opponents are aiming for is an 
independent norm of truth. This fact James 
desired to conceal while the rationalists 
openly admitted it. By "verify-able" James 
means that there is a common-to-all which 
makes it possible for the individual to com- 
pare his judgment with the common judg- 
ment of others. Thus only can he push the 
borders of knowledge past his individual 
experiences to truths imparted by others 
and which he might verify if circumstances 
permitted. He could better have shown the 
error of the rationalist definition of truth by 
calling attention to its fallacy of the ab- 
stract. He would also have secured the 
desired concreteness by open acknowledg- 
ment of a common-to-all in human ex- 
perience by which the individual can verify 
his own conclusions respecting phenomena. 
117 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

But Mr. James tells us that there is no 
such thing as truth independent, and by 
this, if he is consistent, he means truth in- 
dependent of concrete individual experience. 
He declares, "The pragmatist clings to facts 
and concreteness, observes truth at its work 
in particular cases, and generalizes." He 
does not, however, show us the "value" of 
this generalization in a world in which truth 
is to be found only in concrete individual 
cases. How is the pragmatist to possess 
any certainty that his intellectual effort of 
synthesis represents any corresponding real- 
ity? Indeed, it could not apart from a 
higher and uniting intelligence. 

Again he says, "True ideas are those that 
we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and 
verify. False ideas are those we cannot." 
Here, moving on the individualistic plane, 
are certain difficulties that give no promise 
of solution. The jungle-dweller who is told 
for the first time that the earth is round 
might be utterly unable either to assimilate, 
validate, corroborate, or verify the state- 
ment. Would his inability in this respect 
justify him in putting the conception of 
118 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

rotundity in the region of false ideas? 
Would the truth thereby be imperiled? 
Still there are some who profess to believe 
that the roundness of the earth would re- 
main presumably beyond question. It 
would seem to come perilously close to 
being a truth independent of this man's 
concrete individual experience. It might 
conceivably be beyond the concrete indi- 
vidual experience of any dweller upon the 
earth, as in the days before the rotundity of 
the earth was discovered. Was or was it not 
true? Would the earth continue round in 
the absence of human life and intelligence? 
Evidently, the chief pragmatist himself 
was troubled with evil dreams, for a few 
pages later he declares that "verify-ability" 
will do as well as "verify-cation" anyway. 
Here he jumps again from the particular to 
the general without sensing it. If he would 
rescue truth from the uncertainties of indi- 
vidual experiences, he could do so by posit- 
ing a Personality as the World-Ground. He 
could thus have saved his pragmatism and 
have maintained his ground against ration- 
alism. 

119 



PERS0NALI8M AND THE 

Respecting his definition of truth as that 
which serves an end or a purpose, Davidson 4 
very justly calls attention to the fact that 
purpose or end implies an intellectual ele- 
ment at utter variance with the pragmatic 
claim that it is not man's intellect or reason 
which determines reality and truth, but his 
will and his feelings. 

So the pragmatic definition of truth, while 
attempting to avoid the abstractions of ab- 
solute idealism, becomes the prey of a 
solipsistic individualism, because, spurning 
the assistance of metaphysics, it has no 
intelligent ground. At any rate, the serious- 
minded cannot be satisfied with a test of 
value for truth which shall be merely human 
and relative. "We have outgrown the 
standard of a welfare merely human, and 
all the values of such a welfare cannot blind 
us to their narrowness and emptiness." 5 

Are Space and Time the Abiding 

Realities? 
Unwilling to affirm any continuity which 
falls outside the realm of concrete indi- 

4 The Stoic Creed, p. 263. 

6 Eucken, Knowledge and Life, p. 83. 

120 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

vidual experience, because that would be 
untrue to pragmatism, James is forced to 
seek some continuity which will hold his 
disunited and pluralistic world together long 
enough to consider the situation. This con- 
tinuity he gains in a thoroughly naturalistic 
way by assuming time and space as the 
abiding realities. "Space and time are thus 
vehicles of continuity by which the world's 
parts hang together." 6 One must think of 
space and time both as objectively real. Of 
them he says: "Just as atoms, not half or 
quarter atoms, are the minimum of matter 
that can be, and every finite amount of 
matter contains a finite number of atoms, 
so any amounts of time, space, change, etc., 
which we might assume would be composed 
of a finite number of minimal amounts of 
time, space, and change." 7 

One scarcely knows whether to be more 
surprised at the naive boldness in presenting 
such crudities or the uncritical state of the 
mind that could formulate them. In the 
first place, the unseeable and imaginary 



6 James, Pragmatism, p. 134. 

7 Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 154. 

121 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

atom is reduced in words to finite and 
ponderable reality. Then such subjective 
ideas as space and time are spoken of as if 
they could be reckoned in the same way. 
If there is any meaning, it would seem as if 
one might trade a chunk of his space for 
another's time, and so prolong life by re- 
ducing the dimensions of his "verify-able" 
world. 

The resulting mystification regarding the 
nature of time is shown in his view of the 
verification of history by the individual. 
He says: "The stream of time can be re- 
mounted only verbally, or verified indirectly 
by the present prolongations or effects of 
what the past harbored. Yet if they agree 
with these verbalities and effects, we can 
know that our ideas of the past are true. 
As true as past time itself was, so true was 
Julius Caesar, so true were antediluvian 
monsters, all in their proper dates and 
settings." 8 

Truth being confined to concrete indi- 
vidual experience by Mr. James's funda- 
mental postulate, it would seem easier to 

8 Pragmatism, pp. 214, 215. 

122 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

take his say-so for the foregoing than to 
attempt to reach any consistent ground for 
such a view of time. 

The fact is that time is nothing apart 
from an abiding personality to relate its 
flowing events each to each and all to some 
unmoving center. But once this is granted, 
the disunited world in time and space falls 
into wondrous unity which would be quite 
upsetting to the pluralistic mind, which the 
pluralistic mind will not acknowledge but 
without which it cannot think. He should 
have become aware that the "connecting 
medium" was no less than personality when 
he talks about the relationships of life 
breaking up into little worlds, or a multi- 
tude of small systems. 

Pluralism a Confession of Failure to 
Unite Subject and Object 
Being unable from the empirical stand- 
point to found any real unity, James turns 
to pluralism as a means of escape from the 
insistent problems arising out of the con- 
trast between mind and matter, subject and 
object. The mere thought of any essential 
123 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

unity seems repugnant. He says, "If our 
intellect had been as much interested in 
disjunctive as it is in conjunctive relations, 
philosophy would have equally successfully 
celebrated the world's disunion." 9 "Ay, 
there's the rub . . . what dreams!" Why 
is the intellect not equally interested in 
establishing a disjunctive world? The rea- 
son is a very good one. It is because it is 
as mentally impossible to seriously think a 
disjunctive world as to think a topsy-turvy 
world. If we can find no higher unity, it 
will inevitably be this, that there is a world 
of various relations all of which are grasped 
by our intelligence and are thought of as 
"our" world. Even pragmatists are driven 
to this common expedient before they can 
tell us what pragmatism and pluralism are. 
The fact that the world can be understood 
by us is a principle of unity in itself, which 
must be removed before pluralism can be 
admitted. Unity does not depend, as the 
pragmatists seem to think, upon chemical 
spatial and social interaction between given 
individuals. The apple does not quarrel 

9 Pragmatism, p. 137. 

124 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

with the banana because both cannot grow 
on the same tree nor in the same climate. 
They are not for that reason parts of other 
and disunited worlds. They both find a 
unity in the comprehension of very ordinary 
mortals as being in the same world and in 
spite of diversity yielding obedience to the 
same laws. 

Can Pragmatic Pluralism Reach Free- 
dom or Solve the Problem of Evil? 
One reason that Mr. James assigned for 
denying a unitary world was to save some 
place in it for novelty and innovation. 10 
The effort to escape the meshes of absolut- 
ism on the one hand, and to avoid the 
necessities of empiricism on the other, so as 
to gain a place in the world for freedom, is 
a laudable one. But here pluralism offers 
only a false hope. The common example of 
absolute innovation in our world is that 
which is introduced by the free human 
spirit. The moment a free intelligence is 
posited as the world ground we have our 
freedom and not in any otherwise. 

10 Some Problems in Philosophy, p. 132. 

125 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

In similar manner pluralism congratulates 
itself on having escaped the problem of evil. 
It escapes it in the sense that having neither 
God nor absolute the presence of the prob- 
lem need not be accounted for as a moral 
obligation. But in the very same terms 
whereby it escapes the problem it also 
makes void all moral responsibility in the 
individual. If that is truth which the indi- 
vidual sees at the moment — and we must 
hold pluralistic pragmatism to its principles 
here — then any independent norm of right 
moral action is as ridiculous as the abstrac- 
tions of idealism. The maintenance of laws 
and the punishment of offenders against 
such ideal right is involved in the same 
category. What the individual sees for the 
moment is the true and the good. The 
individual cannot be blamed for not seeing 
other than as it presents itself to him. 
Along with the heralded escape from the 
problem of evil has come likewise the 
escape from moral responsibility. One is 
reminded of what Professor Eucken says of 
the moral degradation which followed in 
the wake of the sophistic pragmatism and 
126 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

which was quoted in the early part of this 
chapter. Of course Mr. James did not 
intend this result, for in another place he 
criticizes materialism because it rules out 
the moral order of the world. 11 

Yet with all his love for a disunited world, 
Mr. James seems to tell us of a certain sort 
of unity, a unity of nature that is coming to 
pass gradually in proportion as we verify 
our ideas. It would be difficult to explain 
such a unity except as a subjective and in- 
tellectual one, as the mind reaches conclu- 
sions, classifies and generalizes its knowl- 
edge. But we have already been warned to 
abhor all intellectualism, so that even this 
poor attempt at unity would seem to be 
denied to a consistent pragmatist. 

The whole subject of pluralism has thus 
been summed up by a recent writer, who 
says: "As regards pragmatism, it does not 
furnish us with a pluralistic universe, but 



11 Pragmatism, pp. 105-107. For a discussion of the rela- 
tion of the Scholastic Free Thinkers to Pragmatism in judging 
religion by its utility, politically, morally, and socially, and 
the affirmation that this is the necessary outcome of any 
pragmatism not theistically grounded, see Lange, History of 
Materialism, vol. i, pp. 222ff. 

127 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

with a thinker who interrupts his thinking, 
an experimenter who breaks off his experi- 
ment, whenever it suits his feelings. Prag- 
matistic thought resembles the artist's 
thought, in so far as both not only build 
for the Heart's Desire, but also (as Omar 
Khayyam forgot to mention) break off and 
sweep away its own construction whenever 
the logical necessities, that is, the peculiari- 
ties independent of his wishes, begin to bore 
or annoy it. The pluralistic pragmatist 
takes advantage of the fact (for even he 
must build with facts!) that we need not 
always think on and on, that there are other 
subjects and other points of view; in short, 
that although the independent universe rolls 
on in its established manner, with or without 
the music of the spheres and the hymn of 
Goethe's archangels, human attention can 
turn upon its ear and for a while dream of 
its own juicy cabbages or intoxicating efful- 
gent roses." 12 

In commenting on Plato's search for the 
absolute, Eucken has given in clear state- 
ment the argument against all such prag- 

12 Vernon Lee, Vital Lies, vol. ii, pp. 171, 172. 

128 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

matic schemes of life. "Every human un- 
dertaking which seeks to be self-sufficient, 
and to avoid all responsibility to superior 
authority, he looks upon as petty and neces- 
sarily inadequate. Dominated by a hollow 
show of independence, such efforts can never 
produce more than the appearance of virtue 
and happiness, which is rendered repulsive 
by its self-complacency. . . . However 
much that is problematic may remain in 
Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, the latter dis- 
closes a great truth which we cannot re- 
linquish. And that is the recognition of 
the fact that there is a realm of truth beyond 
the likes and dislikes of men; that truths are 
valid, not because of our consent, but inde- 
pendently of it, and in a sphere raised above 
all human opinion and power. Such a 
conviction is the foundation of the inde- 
pendence of science, and of the secure 
upbuilding of civilization; only a self- 
dependent truth can provide laws and 
norms which elevate human existence be- 
cause they unite it." 13 

13 Eucken, Problem of Human Life, pp. 18-21. 

129 



PERSONALISM AND THE 



CHAPTER IX 

BOWNE'S PRAGMATISM, "A STEP IN 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHIL- 
OSOPHY" 

A Pragmatic Definition of Being 

F. C. S. Schiller, in attacking the abso- 
lutist idea of God froni the pragmatic 
standpoint, declares that the pragmatic de- 
pendence of meaning on purpose "negatives 
the notion that truth can depend on how 
things would appear to an all-embracing, or 
'absolute' mind. For such a mind could 
have no purpose. It could not, that is, 
select part of its content as an object of 
special interest to be operated upon or 
aimed at. In human minds, on the other 
hand, meaning is always selective and 
purposive." 1 

Bowne is equally antagonistic to the 
closed system of the absolutist. He too re- 

1 Schiller, Humanism, p. 10. 

130 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

fused to accept a pantheistic God appearing 
in all his creations and depending upon 
them for his own being, hence thinking 
evil with their evil thoughts and bound to 
a hideous and unethical world which really 
is himself. But we must take note of what 
Schiller's interpretation does to the system. 
With him truth becomes thoroughly indi- 
vidualistic. One man's "truth" is on as 
secure a footing as another's. One man's 
illusions, he being the judge of his truth, 
are as valid as the most plausible conclu- 
sions of another. Schiller seems to feel that 
there cannot be an independent norm of 
truth, apart from Absolutism. In the en- 
deavor to get away from all ideas of truth 
as an abstraction he makes void the value 
of concrete and particular truth. 

Bowne retains his pragmatism, and shows 
the emptiness of the absolute position with- 
out surrendering truth that shall be valid 
for all. He does this through his definition 
of being. We have already noted his defini- 
tion of the real as that which can act or be 
acted upon. The definition of being nat- 
urally follows. It is neither an Abstract 
131 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

Supreme Idea, nor an Unknowable sub- 
stance as the base of phenomena. Being is 
implied in the capacity for intelligent causal 
action, or the capacity of being intelligently 
acted upon. He would join with the prag- 
matists in saying that there is no being 
apart from purpose, meaning, by that, in- 
telligent purpose. All that exists, then, is 
the result or manifestation of a supreme 
active or purposive intelligence and includes 
the world of lesser intelligences. It has no 
meaning apart from this intelligence, which 
is its ground. Mind can understand the 
movement of matter because both proceed 
from the same ground. The mind grasps 
the meaning of the world because it owns a 
kinship with the intelligence that creates 
the world. It is itself purposive and self- 
directing within the world-order. This 
definition of being escapes the pantheistic 
conclusion of absolutism and also avoids 
the mechanical determinism of empiricism. 
All being is, then, according to Bowne, 
essentially causal and active. 2 In reaching 
this conclusion he guards his position by a 

2 For discussion see Bowne, Metaphysics, p. 17. 

132 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

very important discrimination between phe- 
nomenal or inductive as contrasted with 
metaphysical efficiency, which is the imma- 
nent causality of a Fundamental Unitary 
Being. Phenomenal causality refers to the 
laws of change in phenomena which give us 
the anticipated order of events of science. 
These may be studied, classified, and veri- 
fied without reference to their metaphysical 
ground. Metaphysical efficiency has refer- 
ence to that Supreme Intelligent Purpose 
by which all things subsist, and which must 
be affirmed if there is to be any true knowl- 
edge or if the sundered sides of conscious- 
ness are to be united. 3 

The Escape from Pluralism and 
Absolutism to World-Unity 

Convinced that there can be no unity 
without a closed system, with no real free- 
dom and no novelty, the pluralists have 
rushed to the maintenance of a disjunctive 
universe. But a disjunctive universe is as 
much of an impossibility to thought in a 
sane and intelligible world as a universe 

3 Ibid., pp. 83-90. 

133 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

absolutely predetermined by a Supreme 
Idea or by the mechanical necessities of 
materialism. The refuge taken in a pluralis- 
tic universe is simply the attempt to flee 
from one irrationality to a greater. We 
find pluralism unable to reconcile change 
and identity on its impersonal plane. The 
demon of determinism may be momentarily 
exorcised, but with the resulting return of 
seven other demons worse than itself. In 
maintaining a pluralistic universe the plu- 
ralist does not make it disjunctive enough 
to be consistent. Unless he preserves a 
certain amount of unity, the unity of a 
mind able to grasp the fleeting events of 
time and the baffling appearances of change, 
all knowledge would be meaningless. Even 
pluralism would become a jargon of words. 
The baseless fears of pluralism spring from 
a failure adequately to define the meaning 
of unity. Bowne 4 points out the fact that 
the only real unity of which we are directly 
aware is the unity of the free and conscious 
self. The self survives the passing events 
of experience, relates them to itself under 

4 Metaphysics, p. 91. 

134 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

the forms of time and space, and makes 
itself the center of a multitudinous and 
rapidly changing world. That there is any 
higher unity than this synthesis of the 
world by the individual is due to the fact 
that one is not alone in the universe of 
intelligence, but is surrounded by a world 
of self-conscious intelligences which are 
themselves comprehended in synthesis by a 
Supreme Personal Intelligence. Through 
self-conscious and self-acting personality 
alone can the world be brought into sub- 
stantial unity. The experiences of the in- 
dividual, then, become something more than 
peculiar to himself and valid for more than 
himself. Living in a world of intelligences, 
which is maintained by intelligence, his idea 
of truth must conform, not only to the 
common-to-all, but, higher than this, to the 
order of an intelligible world. Thus at a 
single stroke are we rid of the conflict be- 
tween mind and matter, noumena and phe- 
nomena, and the disjointed and illogical 
world of pluralism. This is done also with- 
out resort to an idealism which, though 
grand in its conception, is death to the 
135 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

maintenance of freedom and individuality. 
How strongly Bowne felt toward the out- 
come of such a system may be judged by 
his own words: 

"When we consider life at all reflectively, 
we come upon two facts. First, we have 
thoughts and feelings and volitions; and 
these are our own. We also have a measure 
of self-control, or the power of self -direction. 
Here, then, in experience we find a certain 
selfhood and a relative independence. This 
fact constitutes us real persons, or, rather, 
it is the meaning of our personality. The 
second fact is that we cannot regard this 
life as self-sufficient and independent. How 
the life is possible we do not know; we only 
know that it is. How the two facts are put 
together is altogether beyond us. We only 
know that we cannot interpret life without 
admitting both, and that to deny either 
lands us in contradiction and nonsense. It 
is no doubt fine, and in some sense it is 
correct, to say that God is in all things; 
but when it comes to saying that God is all 
things, and that all forms of thought and 
feeling and conduct are his, then reason 
136 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

simply commits suicide. God thinks and 
feels in what we call our thinking and feel- 
ing; and hence he blunders in our blunder- 
ing and is stupid in our stupidity. He 
contradicts himself also with the utmost 
freedom; for a deal of his thinking does not 
hang together from one person to another, 
or from one day to another in the same 
person. Error, folly, and sin are all made 
divine; and reason and conscience as having 
authority vanish. The only thing that is 
not divine in this scheme is God; and he 
vanishes into a congeries of contradictions 
and basenesses." 5 

The Ideal Nature of Time and Space 

Next to his doctrine of a Supreme Intel- 
ligence as the World-Ground, Bowne is most 
likely to be denied standing as a Prag- 
matist because of his position regarding the 
ideal nature of time and space. Pragma- 
tism of the James type is very prone to fly 
at anything which bears the suggestion of 
idealism. Such pragmatism approaches the 
problems from a realistic if not from a 

6 Bowne, Metaphysics, p. 102. 

137 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

materialistic standpoint. Nevertheless, the 
question of the nature of time and space is 
a momentous one for the cause of pluralistic 
pragmatism. We have already seen, with 
Mr. James, how purely objective is their 
explanation. Space is a sort of entity exist- 
ing for itself, and time is of similar nature, 
to be spoken of as if it possessed extension. 
Mr. James seems to indicate that we are 
sure of the events of history because time 
as an enduring entity pokes itself somewhat 
like a pole into the present. Seeing one end, 
the present, we can be sure there is another 
end, though out of sight. It is not surprising 
that the pragmatists are unwilling to sur- 
render space and time to idealism, for on 
these two hang all the unity that is left 
them, and by their own confession some 
unity is necessary even to a pluralistic 
universe. 

But to consider the question of history, 
what is there in my present that reminds 
me of the historic character, Julius Caesar, 
or compels me to believe that any such 
person ever lived? What realistic way is 
there of being sure that he existed in his 
138 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

time as I in mine? To arrive at such a 
conclusion I must rationalize and relate, and 
this is strictly forbidden by the pragmatic 
doctrine. Indeed, I can have no idea of 
the time that has elapsed since Caesar's day, 
being myself confined to my threescore 
years and ten. But I relate events to my 
own personality in time, and by imagina- 
tion I relate other events and other days of 
which I am told, in some sort of consistent 
order to that time into which my own life 
falls. By the same token I am able to relate 
my present time to a fancied order yet to 
come, and obtain a belief in it only second 
to that which obtains concerning that which 
is told me as history. 

Without a unitary personality the fleeting 
facts and changes of our human life could 
not be related. To-day would have no in- 
telligible relation to yesterday, only that an 
abiding personality superior to the events, 
possessing a certain timelessness, relates 
them to itself. Likewise can we think of 
the events of history only as they might be 
the related experiences of a unitary being 
itself above their flux and change. 
139 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

The Pragmatic Test for Religious 
Values 

James, speaking of the pragmatic test as 
applied to religion, says: "If theological 
ideas prove to have a concrete value for 
life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in 
the sense of being good for so much. For 
how much more they are true will depend 
entirely on their relations to the other 
truths that also have to be acknowledged. 
. . . The true is the name of whatever 
proves itself to be good in the way of belief, 
and good too for definite assignable rea- 
sons." 6 Permission to exist in the prag- 
matic scheme is of little value to religion, 
however, in a many sundered world. With- 
out a fundamental intelligence, capable also 
of moral qualities, with a care for moral law 
binding on all moral creatures, one's theo- 
logical beliefs — indeed, one's ideal of the 
good — becomes momentary and individual. 
The belief which is found to be true for one 
man will be found equally false for another. 
There could be under such a system no 
common moral imperative to receive the 

8 Pragmatism, pp. 73, 76. 

140 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

sanction of all moral beings. Yet this is 
one of the common experiences in life. 

Bowne applied the pragmatic test to re- 
ligion, but from a very different standpoint. 
Affirming a moral governor of the world, 
he yet held that the test of theological 
opinion, of so-called religious experience, 
must ever lie in actual life. "How does it 
work in life?" was a question proper to any 
religious belief whatever. By the practical 
answer must the theory stand or fall. 

On the other hand, those beliefs that have 
been found contributing toward a higher 
civilization, a nobler moral order, a clearer 
conception of duty and the greatest good 
to the race, carry with them their own cre- 
dentials, which cannot be speculatively 
overthrown. 



141 



SECTION IV 

BOWNE AND SOME PRESENT-DAY 

THINKERS 



CHAPTER X 

BERGSON, THE ABSTRACTIONS OF 
AN IMPERSONAL PHILOSOPHY 

Can Knowledge and Life Be Brought 
Together on the Empirical Basis? 

Bergson approaches the problems of phi- 
losophy from the standpoint of empiricism. 
He denies the conclusions of idealism and 
at the same time opposes the claims of 
materialism. He says: "We maintain as 
against materialism, that perception over- 
flows infinitely the cerebral state; but we 
have endeavored to establish as against 
idealism, that matter goes in every direc- 
tion beyond our representation of it, a 
representation which the mind has gathered 
out of it, so to speak, by an intelligent 
choice. Of these two opposite doctrines, 
the one attributes to the body and the other 
to the intellect a true power of creation, the 
first insisting that our brain begets represen- 
145 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

tation and the second that our understand- 
ing designs the plan of nature. And against 
these two doctrines we invoke the same tes- 
timony, that of consciousness, which shows 
us our body as one image among others and 
our understanding as a certain faculty of 
dissociating, of distinguishing, of opposing 
logically, but not of creating or of con- 
structing." 1 

He states the problem of philosophy to 
be the bringing together of the sundered 
sides of consciousness, matter and mind, 
life and knowledge, and discloses the fatal 
flaw in the Spencerian system: "It is 
necessary that these two inquiries, theory 
of knowledge and theory of life, should 
join each other. . . . Together they may 
solve by a method more sure, brought 
nearer to experience, the great problems 
that philosophy poses. For if they should 
succeed in their common enterprise, they 
would show us the formation of the intel- 
lect, and thereby the genesis of that matter 
of which our intellect traces the general 
configuration. They would dig to the very 

1 Matter and Memory, p. 236. 

146 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

root of nature and of mind. They would 
substitute for the false evolutionism of 
Spencer — which consists of cutting up pres- 
ent reality already evolved, into little bits 
no less evolved, and then recomposing it 
with these fragments, thus positing in ad- 
vance everything that is to be explained — 
a true evolutionism, in which reality would 
be followed in its generation and its 
growth." 2 

Of being, Bergson says, "Being, in our- 
selves, is becoming, progress and growth." 3 
Being is, then, a part of the act of con- 
sciousness, matter and mind conjoined in 
perception. The consciousness, freighted 
with all its past, comes to the act of per- 
ception in the present. This activity, the 
consonance of being and knowing, is the 
very essence of reality. 

What Bergson is seeking after is some- 
thing more than mechanical causation that 
would make thought the mere product of 
material forces, while, on the other hand, 
he seeks to establish a world which shall 



2 Creative Evolution, p. xiii, f. 

3 Sc. Le Roy, Philosophy of Bergson, p. 38. 

147 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

not be dependent on the individual judg- 
ment. A world of mechanical causation is 
a closed system and negates the reality of 
knowledge. A world which must search for 
its reality in a Divine Idea alone takes 
away all possibility of novelty or unique- 
ness. Bergson sees that there is a factor of 
which neither side has taken account, the 
factor of novelty, without which there can 
be no progress or evolution. This factor he 
introduces under the name of "vital im- 
pulse," which he makes the seat of reality. 
Does he, then, reach the goal for which he 
has striven — the unity of mind and matter, 
of knowledge and life? He has if we are to 
accept his word as the final authority in the 
matter. But his position contains certain 
important implications that vitiate the 
system. 

Time as Duration 

To escape the Spencerian snare of me- 
chanical explanation, Bergson gives to the 
idea of time as duration the leading role 
in his philosophy. Instead of time being, 
on the one hand, an external reality upon 
148 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

which are strung successive experiences, or, 
on the other, a relating of experiences by an 
abiding personality as with Bowne, Bergson 
takes a position less clear, that the indi- 
vidual contains within himself the past at 
any moment. Duration is not a mere suc- 
cession of appearances, but himself, his in- 
dividuality. His stock illustration of this 
is the rolling snowball: "My mental state," 
he says, "as it advances on the road of 
time, is continually swelling with the dura- 
tion which it accumulates; it goes on in- 
creasing — rolling upon itself, as a snowball 
on the snow." 4 "The past follows us at 
every instant; all that we have thought, 
felt, and willed from our earliest infancy 
is there, leaning over the present which is 
about to join it, pressing against the portals 
of consciousness that would fain leave it 
outside. . . . What are we, in fact, what is 
our character, if not the condensation of the 
history we have lived from our birth — nay, 
even before our birth, since we bring with 
us prenatal dispositions." 5 



i Creative Evolution, p. 2. 
6 Creative Evolution, pp. 4, 5. 

149 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

To understand the implication of this 
doctrine it is necessary to pause and ask 
ourselves a few pertinent questions. 
Granted that time is but a bastard space, 
and is nothing apart from experience. Is 
it not something apart from my individual 
experience? Granted that I derive my 
sense of duration from my own past states. 
What gives me power to go beyond my 
individual experience? If time is nothing 
apart from individual experiences, how can 
any two of us come by the same calendar? 
Why does my time coincide with yours? 
Why is my sense of time greater, the fewer 
the experiences that fill my day, and 
shorter, the more multiplied these ex- 
periences? If this duration is myself and 
at the same time a consciousness, why is 
it that all memories are not with me at the 
same moment, and all are not equally at my 
command? How does attention come in to 
fix some events indelibly in my mind while 
I may deliberately choose to reject others? 
Is not this power of choice, this principle of 
freedom, something apart from the mere 
consciousness, possessing in itself the power 
150 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

of direction? How, having never ex- 
perienced it in consciousness, can I exer- 
cise the historical sense? 

To avoid the deadlock raised by such 
questions as these, we are told of racial 
memories passed along from generation to 
generation. Much language is used to de- 
scribe an imaginary stream or current of 
life. We have been warned to beware of 
abstraction in speaking of life, but now it 
seems expedient to say: "At a certain mo- 
ment, at certain points in space, a visible 
current has taken rise; this current of life, 
traversing the bodies it has organized one 
after another, passing from generation to 
generation, has become divided amongst spe- 
cies and distributed amongst individuals 
without losing anything of its force." 6 Thus 
have we fallen into that very fallacy of 
abstraction against which Bergson had 
warned us. 

If there is a racial memory which flows 
along with and is a part of this current of 
life, just what is it, speaking concretely? 
It remains to be proved that we can inherit 

6 Creative Evolution, p. 26. 

151 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

the intellectual ideas of our ancestors. 
More's the pity for many of us. But it 
seems reasonable to say that there can be 
no experience apart from an experiencing 
intelligence. How, then, can the expe- 
riences of my own immediate ancestors, 
not to mention those of my cousins and my 
aunts, become the property of my con- 
sciousness until they are grasped through 
an effort of my intelligence? Here it is 
evident our progress was only verbal. 

Further: if time is duration, we must 
ask, "For whom?" Events can be gathered 
up and related only by a consciousness 
which not only endures, but is also a self- 
relating personality. This personality can 
relate itself to events outside of its ex- 
perience only as they and it find relation 
through a higher, self-relating Personality, 
which is not fragmentary, but which knows 
all. 

The "Vital Impulse" Assumed for the 

Sake of Freedom 

To free the individual from becoming a 

mere mechanism whose present is the pro- 

152 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

duct of past states, and to give place to 
initiative, Bergson introduces the factor 
which he calls the "vital impulse." He 
says: "The role of life is to insert some 
indetermination into matter. Indetermi- 
nate, i. e., unforeseeable, are the forms it 
creates in the course of its evolution." 7 It 
is the "vital impulse" which gives rise to 
new possibilities. It is the source and ex- 
planation of evolution. Instead of a closed 
mechanical universe, we have one in which 
any miracle may occur. While avoiding a 
universe of mechanism on the one hand, 
and a fore-ordered world on the other, he 
seems to choose a world in which God him- 
self cannot know what is going to happen. 

It is difficult to see how in such a scheme 
it is possible to preserve any order of 
nature whatever. All purpose, order, or pre- 
dictableness is especially horrifying as im- 
plying a closed system and an absence of 
freedom. The "vital impulse" raised to the 
power of a self -directive intelligent person- 
ality would give ground, not only for 
freedom, but also for the usual order of 



Creative Evolution, p. 126. 

153 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

phenomena. The very order of occurrence 
would be based upon such a Supreme Will. 
By gaining freedom without such a Per- 
sonality Bergson undoes the possibility of 
a unitary world of relations. This con- 
clusion has been very well brought out by 
the criticism of a well-known writer: "If 
for the magic power of types invoked by 
Aristotle we substituted, with M. Bergson, 
the magic power of the 'elan vital/ that is, 
of evolution in general, we should be re- 
ferring events not to finer, more familiar, 
more pervasive processes, but to one all- 
embracing process, unique and always in- 
complete. Our understanding would end 
in something far vaguer and looser than 
what our observation began with. Aris- 
totle at least could refer particulars to their 
specific types, as medicine and social science 
are still glad enough to do, to help them in 
guessing and in making a learned show be- 
fore the public. But if divination and 
eloquence — for science is out of the ques- 
tion — were to invoke nothing but a fluid 
tendency to grow, we should be left with a 
flat history of phenomena and no means of 
154 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

prediction or even classification. All knowl- 
edge would be reduced to gossip, infinitely 
diffuse, perhaps enlisting our dramatic feel- 
ings, but yielding no intellectual mastery of 
experience, no practical competence, and no 
moral lesson. The world would be a serial 
novel, to be continued forever, and all men 
mere novel readers." 8 

A Harmony Due to Identity of 
Impulsion 
Having rejected both radical mechanism 
and radical finalism, Bergson attributes 
those harmonies in nature that have fur- 
nished materials for the teleological argument 
of theology to an identity of impulsion 
rather than to an aspiration after any 
future goal existent in the mind of a 
Creator. He says: "If the evolution of life 
is something other than a series of adapta- 
tions to accidental circumstances, so also it 
is not the realization of a plan. A plan is 
given in advance. It is represented, or at 
least representable, before its realization." 9 



8 Santayana, Winds of Doctrine, p. 

9 Creative Evolution, p. 52. 

155 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

Such harmony, he concludes, would be won 
only at the expense of freedom. "If, on the 
contrary, the unity of life is to be found 
solely in the impetus that pushes it along 
the road of time, the harmony is not in 
front, but behind." 10 

At this point we ought to stop and take 
inventory of our ideas to be saved from 
being swept along on the wave of undefined 
terms. What do we mean by unity of life? 
Is the "impetus" something that survives 
the passage of time and events. If there is 
to be a continuity in an impetus, something 
must keep its identity. Just what would 
the identity of a changing impetus be? We 
cannot have identity without something to 
be identical. To have consciousness of 
change there must be an abiding element 
that survives change. Personality is the 
only reality in life which we can actually 
posit as causing or experiencing change and 
yet itself maintaining its identity. Is the 
"vital impulse," then, an unchanging per- 
sonality? If it is not (and we are given no 
such clue to its nature), then all must have 

10 Creative Evolution, p. 103. 

156 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

been set going in some past time. In that 
case we have not escaped from the closed 
system Bergson seeks to avoid, but have, 
rather, fallen back into the pit. If it is not 
a personality, and yet acts in the present in 
lives so diverse as Mr. Bergson's and mine, 
of what does the unity consist? 

Out of this positing of the "vital im- 
petus" grows Bergson's definition of God: 
"God has nothing of the already made; he 
is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, 
so conceived, is not a mystery; we expe- 
rience it ourselves when we act freely." 11 

By this definition he hopes to escape the 
dilemma just mentioned. This is because 
he senses the fact that his problem cannot be 
met on the impersonal plane. It remains to 
inquire if the God of his definition is suffi- 
cient for the need. To provide the necessary 
impetus we have a growing, changing, be- 
coming God. The question at once arises 
as to how a becoming God, who is himself 
a part of the general movement, could, with 
a constantly changing mind, outlook, and 
purpose, furnish an identity of impulsion. 

u Creative Evolution, pp. 104, 105. 

157 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

Where are we to find the looked-for har- 
mony? Will the harmony be for this day, 
this hour, or this minute? It includes all? 
Then we cannot avoid pantheism, and 
every kind of impulse, criminal and saintly, 
the strange gamut of human heroism and 
beastliness, are a part of God and issue 
from the "vital impetus." We have crawled 
in by the cellar window to find ourselves 
once more in the pent-up quarters of Abso- 
lutism, out of the front door of which we 
recently marched with drums beating and 
banners flaunting. What Eucken says of 
the spiritual life is here equally applicable 
to the thought of a becoming God: "Spirit- 
ual life must never be understood as an 
entire Becoming — as a mere Process — for, if 
this were the case, Truth would become the 
mere slave of its age; and such a state of 
things would mean an inner destruction of 
Truth." 12 In the same way a becoming 
God falls prey to his own creation, is no 
God. 

But Bergson's object in positing a God is 
to provide a ground of duration which shall 

12 Eucken, Knowledge and Life, p. 228. 

158 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

include all human experiences of duration. 
We have already noted the timeless element 
necessary to all consciousness of change. If 
we are to have a God who will be a real 
Ground, he must himself be more than a 
creation of time, else there is nothing in the 
thought of duration as Bergson employs the 
term. But we cannot admit the assump- 
tion of a God not a creation of time without 
being led far afield from Bergson's stand- 
point. Bowne has well expressed the rela- 
tion of the Supreme Being to time in his 
discussion of the Kantian philosophy: 

"The bringing of the present with the 
resultant time judgment into relation to 
activity greatly modifies the subject. We 
call those things present which we possess 
in the certain immediacy of consciousness, 
and if we possessed all our experiences in a 
similar immediacy, the whole experience 
would be present in the same sense. There 
would still be a certain order of arrangement 
among the factors of experience which could 
not arbitrarily be modified, but all the mem- 
bers of the series would be equally present 
to the consciousness. If, now, there were a 
159 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

being who could retain all the facts of his 
experience in the same immediacy, he would 
have no past. And, further, if such a being 
were in full possession of himself, so as to be 
under no law of development and possessing 
no unrealized potentialities, he would also 
have no future, at least so far as his own 
existence might be concerned. His present 
world would be all-embracing, and his now 
would be eternal. These considerations 
modify our judgment of the subjectivity of 
time very profoundly. Taking up once 
more the question, Are we in time? we see 
that it has several meanings and the an- 
swers must vary to correspond. If it means, 
Are things and events in a real time which 
flows on independently of them? the answer 
must be, No. If it means, Does our ex- 
perience have the temporal form? the an- 
swer must be, Yes. If we further inquire 
about the possibility of transcending tem- 
poral limitations, it is clear that this can be 
affirmed only of the Absolute Being, for 
only in him do we find that complete self- 
possession which the transcendence of time 
would mean. Nontemporality, then, in the 
160 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

concrete sense cannot be reached by passing 
behind the world of phenomena into the 
world of noumena, but, rather, and only by 
rising above the sphere of the finite into the 
absolute self-possession of the infinite." 13 

Bergson lacks what Bowne had so clearly, 
a Personal World-Ground, himself the un- 
changing Cause of change. Bergson leaves 
out of reckoning that purpose which makes 
humanity great. For man is indeed great in 
the universe and the lord of all only as be- 
hind his little and short-sighted purpose lies 
a deeper Purpose which is also a Person. 

In this connection my attention has been 
called to a letter written by Mr. Bergson to 
Father Joseph de Tonquedec, S. J., and 
quoted in a recent review of Bergson's 
philosophy : 14 

"I speak of God (pp. 268-272 of L'Evo- 
lution Creatrice) as of the source whence 
issue successively, by an effect of his free- 
dom, the 'currents' or 'impulses' each of 
which will make a world; he therefore, re- 



13 Bowne, Kant and Spencer, pp. 158, 159. 

14 Ruhe and Paul, Henri Bergson, an Account of his Life 
andPhilosophy, p. 42. 

161 



PEKSONALISM AND THE 

mains distinct from them, and it is not of 
him that we can say that 'most often it turns 
aside' or it is 'at the mercy of the materiality 
that it has been bound to adopt.' "... 
Again he is quoted as saying: "From all 
this emerges clearly the idea of a God, 
Creator and free, the generator of both 
matter and life, whose work of creation is 
continued on the side of life by the evolu- 
tion of species and the building up of human 
personalities. From all this emerges, conse- 
quently, a refutation of monism and of 
pantheism in general." 15 

The reply to this is that if Mr. Bergson 
wishes to hold to this conception of God, he 
must modify his system. He here assumes 
that God is made free by fiat. This state- 
ment does not remove the yoke of necessity 
which must ever hang about the neck of a 
Being whose mind, thought, and moral 
character are in process of becoming — that 
is, who is himself a creature of time. It is 
not enough to affirm that God always ex- 
isted. We must go still further and ask 
what he was at first. In the case of a be- 

16 Ibid., p. 44. 

162 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

coming God he may not have been God in 
the beginning. He may have grown to 
that estate. Mental and moral perfection 
and timelessness, in other words, are neces- 
sary to our thought of God. A lesser Being 
may be a blind demiurge, but possessing no 
personality, becomes inevitably the victim 
of his own world. If Mr. Bergson wishes to 
avoid a pantheistic God, it devolves upon 
him to modify his philosophy, and to so 
clear his definitions that a pantheistic God 
will not be implied. 

His Doctrine of Knowledge 

We must not leave this brief review of 
Bergson's system without looking at his 
doctrine of intelligence and intuition as 
contrasting forms of knowledge. He sug- 
gests that intuition really gets nearer to 
life, while intellect is, by the nature of the 
mind, bound to the rigors of geometrical ex- 
planation. The knowledge gained by in- 
tuition is, however, intensive, and applicable 
only in a realm of limited life. But intelli- 
gence is able to transcend itself: "There are 
things that intelligence alone is able to 
163 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. 
These things instinct alone could find; but 
it will never seek them." 16 

Intuition leads us to the very inwardness 
of life. Intelligence, however, had the abil- 
ity to turn inward on itself and to "awaken 
the potentialities of intuition which slumber 
within it." 17 Intuition "is a lamp almost 
extinguished, which only glimmers now and 
then, for a few moments at most. But it 
glimmers wherever a vital interest is at 
stake. On our personality, on our liberty, 
on the place we occupy in the whole of 
nature, on our origin, and perhaps also on 
our destiny, it throws a light feeble and 
vacillating, but none the less pierces the 
darkness of the night in which the intellect 
leaves us. . . . Philosophy introduces us 
thus into the spiritual life. And it shows 
us at the same time the relation of the life 
of the spirit to that of the body. ... A 
philosophy of intuition will be a negation of 
science, will be sooner or later swept away 
by science, if it does not resolve to see the 



16 Creative Evolution, p. 151. 

17 Ibid., p. 182. 



164 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

life of the body just where it really is, on 
the road that leads to the life of the spirit. 
But it will then no longer have to do with 
definite living beings. Life as a whole 
from the initial impulsion that thrust it 
into the world will appear as a wave which 
rises, and which is opposed by the de- 
scending movement of matter. On the 
greater part of its surface, at different 
heights, the current is converted by matter 
into a vortex. At one point alone it passes 
freely, dragging with it the obstacle which 
will weigh on its progress, but will not stop 
it. At this point is humanity; it is our 
privileged situation. On the other hand, 
this rising wave is consciousness, and, like 
all consciousness, it includes potentialities 
without number which interpenetrate and to 
which consequently neither the category of 
unity nor that of multiplicity is appropriate, 
made as they both are for inert matter. 
The matter that it bears along with it and 
in the interstices of which it inserts itself, 
alone can divide it into distinct individuali- 
ties. On flows the current, running through 
human generations, subdividing itself into 
165 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

individuals. This subdivision was vaguely 
indicated in it, but could not have been 
made clear without matter. Thus souls are 
continually being created, which neverthe- 
less, in a certain sense, preexisted. . . . All 
the living hold together, and all yield to the 
same tremendous push. The animal takes 
its stand on the plant, man bestrides ani- 
mality, and the whole of humanity, in space 
and in time, is one immense army galloping 
beside and before and behind each of us in 
an overwhelming charge able to beat down 
every resistance and clear the most formid- 
able obstacles, perhaps even death." 18 

It seems a pity to disturb the grandeur of 
words that for abstraction would do credit 
to the absolute philosophy itself. Out of the 
mazes two pertinent questions arise. The 
first has respect to the intuitive nature of 
religion and its contrast with anything in- 
tellectual. If intuitive knowledge is closer 
to life, and religion is grasped by intuition 
alone, why does not the savage possess the 
highest form of religion? To ask this ques- 
tion is to perceive its answer. To follow 

18 Creative Evolution, pp. 269-271. 

166 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

reason in religion instead of blind impulse 
is to be moral and to attain the highest 
reaches of character. Religion without the 
intellectual content has ever proved un- 
worthy and inadequate. Furthermore, if we 
are to posit any reality in "the life of the 
spirit," we must provide some ground for it 
in the "vital impulse" with its essence of 
Becoming. If we do this, we shall have a 
God who is only growing from wickedness 
to righteousness, and we obtain a reversal 
of moral standards and responsibilities. 

The second question arises out of the 
statement that the life of the spirit will "no 
longer have to do with definite living being." 
We at once ask what such a life of the spirit 
would mean, and what it would amount to 
if it meant anything. By the definition it 
could mean nothing for human beings; and 
if it meant anything to God or to the "vital 
impulse," we would have no means of ascer- 
taining. All of which goes to show that we 
have been regaled with a form of words and 
a sound of wisdom. 

That Bergson has done a real service to 
philosophy by calling attention to intelli- 
167 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

gence and intuition as contrasting forms of 
knowledge cannot be gainsaid. The idea is 
vast in its possibility of explaining the ab- 
normalities of genius, the uniqueness of 
Jesus, the authority of divine revelation, 
and the possibility of revelation to those 
who, untrained in the schools, are yet open 
to the deepest voices of our being. Berg- 
son's proclamation of the value of the 
common intuitions, the possibility of the 
possession of the deepest insights by the 
unlettered, is one of the things that have 
drawn to him great popular attention. But 
that his ideas lack the metaphysical ground- 
ing that would make them most effective 
must be admitted. The truth of this state- 
ment will never be more evident than upon 
comparison of the abstractions of Berg- 
son's impersonalism with the directness of 
Bowne's personalism. 



168 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 



CHAPTER XI 

EUCKEN— THE RETURN TO 
SPIRITUAL VERITY 

So many excellent expositions and reviews 
of the important work of this leading thinker 
of the present time have already appeared that 
it is here unnecessary to do more than touch 
upon the few leading features of his system 
in order to gather the affinity and relation- 
ship of his thought with that of Bowne. 

The two thinkers possess essential fea- 
tures in common. There was between them 
the warmest personal regard and mutual 
appreciation. Their harmony was arrived 
at quite independently, though both had 
been pupils of Lotze. We are told that the 
young Eucken was not favorably impressed 
with Lotze, and after a short time at Got- 
tingen passed on to another university. On 
the other hand, Bowne is most often known 
for his likeness to his former teacher. The 
similarities between Bowne and Eucken, 
however, lie, rather, along the line of the 
169 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

positions to which Bowne advanced inde- 
pendently of Lotze. The strength of the 
latter lay, rather, in his dialectic and in his 
power of clear criticism than in construc- 
tiveness and advance. 

Reality Must Include More Than 

Things, and Moke Than Ideas 
Eucken opposes the pretensions of the 
naturalistic school to include the whole 
world in the experience of phenomena, 
which leads direct to skepticism and the 
denial of knowledge. He also takes issue 
with the Absolute Philosophy, which would 
confine all truth to vague and shadowy 
ideas. He will not deny reality to the ob- 
jective world, nor will he allow that the 
world of thought is of itself complete. He 
points, rather, to the value of the ideal as 
something toward which man may bend his 
energies in achievement. It is possible for 
intellect to arrive at great and inspiring 
ideals, but these find content and value 
only as they are achieved. He points out 
the impossibility of moral victory and of 
progress in history and civilization, if man 
170 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

is to be left at the dead level of a phenomenal 
and disunited world. It is the power of 
intellectual synthesis which enables man to 
apprehend truth and then by actual strug- 
gle to make the truth his own in character. 
In this "activism" Eucken would unite the 
subjective and objective worlds, the clue to 
whose relationship he finds in the life of the 
spirit. The spiritual in man is thus seen as 
something not so indefinite as to be a mere 
bringer of individual peace and comfort, as 
has often been the case with the followers 
of absolutism. Nothing is really had apart 
from struggle and the realization of the 
ideal in life. Spiritual truth, from being a 
wandering child of intellect or emotion, be- 
comes a fundamental fact, the fundamental 
reality, for in its outworking it is the highest 
expression of man's very being. 

Truth Must Have a Common Validity 

Though insisting that ideal truth must 
find its value and verification in actual liv- 
ing, Eucken would resent being classed as a 
pragmatist according to the type of William 
James. He saves his pragmatic test of the 
171 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

reality of the ideal from falling into the 
pluralistic confusion of the latter by assert- 
ing the universal validity of truth. Truth 
has an authoritative validity far above the 
power of individual thought or caprice. 
James' repugnance to all general ideas and 
to all absolute standards led him to a view 
of truth which made it the victim of the 
individual notion, the individual himself 
being the sole judge of what is useful, good, 
and, therefore, true. No one has shown 
more clearly than Eucken the absurdity and 
worthlessness of a truth whose only norm 
is its utility for the individual on a given 
occasion. To make the truth thus the 
prey of individual choices, of individual 
standards of judgment and states of civiliza- 
tion, is to destroy its own inner character. 
So while bringing all ideals to the pragmatic 
test of action, he would claim for them a 
validity outlasting the moment of realiza- 
tion by a single individual. The great norms 
of truth lift themselves up like mountains 
in the moral consciousness of men as some- 
thing worthy to be achieved, and will ever 
so lift themselves, independent of the moral 

172 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

failure to achieve, either on the part of any 
one man, or of any class of men, or of an 
epoch or an age. Thus Eucken assumes 
theism as the very ground of truth. 

"We look at nature very differently from 
our forefathers. It no longer seems to us a 
realm of soulful harmony and blessed peace, 
but, rather, a complex riddle, the arena on 
which a perpetual struggle for existence is 
being enacted. Men too, in the wild vortex 
of political and social struggles, lose the 
romantic glory of former days; and even the 
exaltation of personality so usual to-day, of 
its grandeur, dignity, and so on — unless 
grounded on something greater and deeper 
— becomes merely a hollow and irrelevant 
phrase, especially in an age which so forces 
upon our notice the smallness and self- 
seeking of man. As things stand the only 
choice is between theism and atheism." 1 

Eucken's Personal Idealism, the Reali- 
zation of the Life of the Spirit 

It will be readily seen that Eucken's in- 
terests lie naturally with idealism in that he 

1 Eucken, Can We Still Be Christians? p. 144. 

173 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

defends and maintains the necessity of the 
ideal to all true progress. He does not 
thereby, however, commit himself to that 
system of necessity in which intellectualism 
finds itself. Reality lies, not in the Divine 
as a passive thing, but, rather, in its 
realization, in its springing into action in 
the concrete. At the same time that he 
thus makes place for freedom and initiative 
he escapes that pantheism into which abso- 
lute idealism inevitably falls. The only dif- 
ference here between Eucken and Bowne is 
one of emphasis rather then essence. 

Bowne brings his thought to great clear- 
ness and definiteness by gathering it up into 
his definition of personality. The difference 
is not constitutional. It has been Bowne's 
distinctive task to develop the idea of per- 
sonality. Eucken's peculiar work has been 
to emphasize the place and reality of the 
life of the spirit. 

The Absence of the Christological 

Interest 
There is at one point an essential differ- 
ence between Bowne and Eucken. This is 
174 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

at the point which affects the Christological 
interest, which is a very important part of 
Bowne's system. With Eucken, the appear- 
ance of the Deity in a historic point of time, 
speaking likewise an eternal message, is un- 
thinkable. The realization of the moral 
idea agrees inevitably with a slow advance 
toward such an ideal. The ideal itself is 
affected by its realization. Any revelation 
of a perfect ideal in a historic personality 
seems to him to put a stop to struggle and 
progress. To him such revelation is incon- 
gruous with imperfect human comprehen- 
sion and achievement. Eucken himself tells 
us of the impossibility of the atheistic stand- 
point and assumes theism as the necessary 
moral grounding of the ideal which lifts it 
above the individual judgments and ca- 
prices of men to universal validity. To 
Bowne this very view would demand the 
incarnation for its completion. Eucken has 
spoken of love as a manifestation of this 
universally valid moral ideal. Yet it would 
be impossible in a world of pain and error, 
of human vanity and failure, of ruthless and 
crushing brute force, to conceive of love as 
175 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

the possession of the Supreme Moral Being 
unless we had been directed to it through 
the life of Jesus himself. The incarnation 
becomes in the experience of man the most 
effective spur to the realization of that ideal. 
The deity of Jesus hinges upon this moral 
necessity. We have again and again in 
human history the example of men in a 
supreme self-renunciation giving their lives 
for the realization of the higher moral aims 
and happiness of their fellow men. What 
shall we conclude concerning a magnified 
personality, the abode of absolute ideals, 
who can do no more than give advice by 
which to offset the disheartening evils and 
the crushing sorrows of the world? Without 
an incarnation man would himself be cap- 
able of a moral grandeur and outlook of 
which God would give no evidence. The 
incarnation is necessary to save the thought 
of moral perfection in God. An incarnation 
past or an incarnation to come would seem 
to Bowne to be implied by the demands of 
thought. 

"If God had filled space and time with 
inanimate worlds, that would have revealed 
176 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

only power and skill. If he had filled the 
world with pleasure-giving contrivances, 
that would have revealed benevolence. If 
he had sent us prophets and teachers at no 
real cost to himself, that too would be 
something; but it would not greatly stir 
our hearts toward God. Our love would go 
out to the prophets and teachers themselves, 
for the toil and pain would fall on them. 
In all beneficence of this sort God would 
appear simply as a rich man who out of his 
abundance scatters bounty to the needy, 
but at no cost to himself. A certain grati- 
tude would indeed be possible, but along 
this line God would forever remain morally 
below the moral heroes of our race. Their 
gifts cost. They put themselves and their 
hearts into their work. They attain to the 
morality of self-sacrifice, and this is in- 
finitely beyond the morality of any giving 
that does not cost. And there must ever 
be a higher moral possibility until we reach 
the revelation of God in self-sacrifice, until 
God becomes the chief of burden-bearers 
and the leader of all in self-abnegation. 
. . . Thus the power of God's revelation has 
177 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

its chief source in the incarnation. And we 
may be perfectly sure that no lower con- 
ception of God will permanently command 
the minds and hearts of men. We should 
not have reached the conception ourselves, 
but now that it has been revealed to us, we 
see that something of the kind is a moral 
necessity if we are to think the highest 
thought of God. And there is a peculiar 
dialectic in human thought whereby we are 
compelled to think of God as perfect or not 
at all. An imperfect God is none. As soon 
as a higher conception emerges we must 
adopt it into our thought of God or see our 
faith in him fade out until it vanishes alto- 
gether. A fairly good God we cannot abide. 
We can be satisfied with nothing less than 
the supreme and the perfect. Hence it is 
that the Christian thought of God wins its 
way. It is the only one worthy of God or 



man. 



"3 



How God could empty himself to become 
a partaker in human toils and sorrows will 
remain, of course, inexplicable. It will also 
remain beyond our comprehension how a 

2 Bowne, Studies in Christianity, pp. 96, 104. 

178 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

timeless personality could reveal himself to 
any part of his world in any degree, or, in 
revealing the moral ideal to man, consent 
to work under the limitations of time. The 
particular ground of this difficulty is in the 
confusing of the power world with the 
space and time world. 

If, however, the debate should rage about 
the thought of the possession by the historic 
Jesus in the flesh of all the divine powers 
and attributes in order to establish his 
Deity, we have recourse to the theory of the 
Kenosis. We believe his deity is sufficiently 
verified by the revelation of perfect moral 
character which formed the supreme object 
of his revelation. The deity of Jesus is 
proved neither by genealogy nor miracle in 
themselves. 

The character and personality of Jesus is 
the world's great miracle. The most con- 
vincing test for the present age is to be 
found in the essentially universal master- 
ship of the character of Jesus, and his ability 
to satisfy the moral and spiritual demands of 
all classes and conditions of men. No other 
man, prophet or hero, ever lived that could 
179 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

for any length of time, for all races of man, 
fulfill in his own character their highest ideal 
of the character of God. Eucken speaks of 
him as classified with other great geniuses. 
Viewed from the single standpoint of his 
teaching of moral truth, this might be. 
One might come with transcendent spirit- 
ual insight to do for the realm of religion 
what Shakespeare and Mozart have done 
in the realm of literature and music. But 
great genius has too often been common- 
place in morals and in ideals. There is no 
certainty that a future age may not produce 
a greater master than either. The love and 
the passion of Jesus, his revelation of the 
moral character of God, can never be 
transcended so long as humanity shall re- 
tain its essential nature. But Jesus is much 
more than the teacher of a truth which has 
not been transcended. In the case of spirit- 
ual revelation, the personality of the teacher 
is quite as important as his message. Not 
only are his truths compelling for all classes 
of men, his personality has never been 
transcended as the supreme goal of man's 
achievement. He thus remains undimmed 
180 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

above the march of ages, and every moral 
advance of the race but serves to increase 
the appreciation in which he is held. The 
actual test between Jesus and other geniuses 
is to be found in his character, in himself. 
His deity is to be read in the universal 
compulsion and validity of his order of 
life. Incarnation is the easiest and most 
satisfying explanation of the character of 
Jesus. All others break down. 

Disagreement with his Christological 
views is likely to blind the eyes of many of 
the most conscientious to the greatness and 
the importance to religion of the work of 
Rudolf Eucken. He easily represents the 
supreme philosophical message of our day, 
and his constructive work and leadership 
promises to wield a profound influence in 
the cause of faith. His voice comes to his 
time like that of one of the Hebrew prophets, 
when the age engrossed in the pursuit of 
material things was forgetting that it had a 
soul at all. He speaks to an age that in its 
scientific thinking has steadily barred out 
the spiritual as an illusion and a dream. 
He speaks to a world of philosophy which 
181 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

to a large degree has lost its way in the 
meshes of skepticism and materialism. And 
his word is ever for the reality of the higher 
things of the spirit, in behalf of the neces- 
sity for the moral regeneration of man, and 
the life that is lived in conscious harmony 
with God. He shows in phrases of beauty 
and convincing power that though a man 
possess the whole world, if he loses his own 
soul he has utterly failed. For back of all 
our getting and enjoying the fundamental 
truth of life is the spiritual. Adapting an 
old, old thought, the chief end of man is 
the realization of God. 



182 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 



CHAPTER XII 

BOWNE'S PERSONALISM AND THE 
PROBLEMS OF LIFE 

At the risk of repetition, it may be well 
to touch upon the relation of Personalism 
to some of the problems of life. Bowne 
saw, as few others, how impossible it is to 
account for an intelligible and orderly world, 
for knowledge and for spiritual reality, on 
the plane of the impersonal. This was his 
distinctive contribution to philosophy. So 
clear was his criticism along this line that 
all metaphysical thinking will be forced to 
take account of it. 

Unity Possible Only Through 
Personalism 
Personalism is the most reasonable solu- 
tion of the problem of unity. A unity ob- 
tained by assuming a unitary substance 
must inevitably negate the reality of knowl- 
edge, mind, and spirit. A unity which is 
won by lifting time and space into realities 
183 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

independent of all intelligence, involves 
confusion no less than that of materialism. 
Time as duration cannot be thought with- 
out a clearly defined personality which is 
more than consciousness, more than memory, 
self-directing and free. Change and identity 
are irreconcilable except through an abiding 
Personality surviving above their fluctua- 
tions. A unity obtained by assuming an 
Absolute of whose thought the world is but 
the outworking, ends in a pantheism fatal 
to all freedom or individuality. If instead 
of naming a vague Absolute as the ground 
of all things, we assume a free Personality 
upholding the world of things, and the 
world of spirits endowed by him with a 
freedom akin to his own, then all is well. 
There exists, then, no insoluble problem of 
how the mind can grasp matter or of how its 
knowledge can represent reality. It is no 
longer necessary to attempt the tracing of 
matter and motion and molecular change 
into the brain cells to account for an idea 
of beauty or an aspiration of the soul after 
God. We note for scientific or pathological 
purposes the physical changes and the psy- 
184 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

etiological results, but we no longer dream 
that we have grasped all the factors in the 
process, nor do we relegate to the realm of 
unreality all that our investigation fails to 
explain. We think truly of the world of 
matter because the world of matter is 
founded in an Intelligence related to our 
own. The mind and the world are by their 
very nature prepared to correspond and co- 
operate, and both find synthesis and agree- 
ment in that intelligent Personality which is 
able to grasp all and to act in all. 

There is no longer a conflict between 
science and religion, because the laws of 
nature are seen as the self-imposed ways of 
the Divine in bringing forth the order of 
change. Natural laws are not erected into 
an independent system in which God is a 
slave, for they are but the uniformities of 
his activity. The deductions which we draw 
from the order of sequence are not to be 
given a causal efficiency. 

Personalism and Freedom 
We thus come to the problem of freedom 
and necessity. Freedom is not provided for 
185 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

in any naturalistic scheme whatever. This 
is not alone because of innate or a priori 
ideas which cannot be traced to experience. 
It is not merely inability to trace the 
products of reflection to appropriate nervous 
excitations. The power of self -directing per- 
sonality to introduce its own will as a new 
factor into the order of nature is too evident 
in common experience to be overlooked. 
This introduction of purpose to modify the 
natural processes is something of which 
nature herself is evidently incapable. The 
mechanical system of causation would not 
only deprive man of individuality, but 
would preclude the possibility of moral 
action. 

The outcome of absolutism of the extreme 
type is very close to that of materialism 
despite their wide difference of spirit and of 
aim. Absolutism, seeing in all a manifesta- 
tion of the Divine Idea, cannot escape mak- 
ing God a moral monster, responsible for 
the weaknesses, errors, and sins of men. 
By the same token man would be no longer 
morally responsible, because he would not be 
free. He would be but the unresisting tool 
186 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

through which the Divine works sometimes 
good and sometimes ill. 

On the personal plane we can affirm a 
good and perfect God who has given to man 
a personality measurably like his own, free 
to act in accordance with or against the 
Divine will. Moral action is of like nature 
in God and man, being voluntarily chosen 
in distinction from wrong. Man becomes 
thus morally responsible, and his freedom 
to make a confusion of God's world is a 
gift to which he is to be held strictly to 
account. He is no longer to be considered 
as giving forth the thoughts and activities 
to which he is compelled by physical en- 
vironment, nor is he an automaton, finding 
all his thoughts of holiness or wickedness 
inspired by the Eternal, the manifestations 
of whose thought under the absolutist 
scheme, they would be. 

Personalism and the Problem of Evil 

The schools of idealism and of material- 
ism find equal difficulty when they face the 
problem of evil. If one were compelled to 
choose between the two, the dilemma which 
187 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

they present is this: either a God who is 
as responsible for evil as he is for good, or a 
world that is essentially unmoral. In either 
case it would be impossible to hold to indi- 
vidual moral responsibility. No doubt if all 
the wrong that springs from immoral think- 
ing and acting were eliminated, the great 
mass of evil that depresses man and creates 
his problem would be done away. Still 
there would remain the mysteries of pain 
and death, and for these it would at first 
seem almost impossible to clear the Infinite 
Personality. This point is the rock on which 
theism is supposed to wreck itself. 

One thing is certain: there can be no 
satisfactory solution for human spirits along 
the line of blind, purposeless, impersonal 
causation. If our sorrows, griefs, and ills 
are not for discipline after some manner, we 
have simply to cry into the dark. We may 
not be able to satisfy our minds, but we 
certainly cannot satisfy our souls except 
through assuming a divine purpose which 
works good in our behalf through pain. 
When to the demand of our spirits we add 
the consciousness of our limitations in 
188 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

knowledge and our lack of understanding of 
disciplines which have afterward proved the 
most substantial blessings, we can see how 
an Intelligence not bound to the temporal 
form of experience, seeing the end from the 
beginning, in view of the moral discipline 
attained, might account the whole course as 
very good. Why discipline should be neces- 
sary is a question bound up with that of the 
attainment of character. That it is neces- 
sary is a commonplace of experience. 

If the further question of the suffering of 
the innocent for the guilty is invoked, we 
can only say that, in such a case, suffering 
is a contribution to the moral progress of 
the world. Voluntarily accepted, it becomes 
to the sufferer, by that strange mystery of 
personality, the deepest and most satisfying 
joy that life can give. If to this thought 
should be added the thought of the Creator 
of all entering with moral fullness into 
human life and giving himself for the moral 
welfare of his creatures, we should at once 
make possible the maintenance of theism in 
the face of the problem of evil. This as- 
sumption would also be in strict keeping 
189 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

with the deepest facts of religion and of life. 
In the world around us we begin to see 

On every side 
Great hints of Him go by — 
Souls that are hourly crucified 
On some new Calvary! 



In flower and dust, in chaff and grain, 
He binds Himself and dies! 
We live by His eternal pain, 
His hourly sacrifice. 3 

What of death, that last but not most 
inexplicable of mysteries? No man who 
has had wide experience of life is unaware 
that in a world of physical and moral in- 
firmity there frequently arise situations to 
which death itself is a welcome relief. Here, 
as before, there is no explanation on the 
impersonal plane. The world has too often 
witnessed the cynicism and moral flabbiness 
of those who assume that there is no sur- 
vival of death. That assumption has long 
been proved as not the road that leads to 
high moral achievement and the enrich- 
ment of life with things most precious. So 

3 Noyes, "Vicisti Galilese," Collected Poems, vol. i, p. 244. 

190 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

much there is for the practical side of the 
argument. 

On the theoretical side is still another 
consideration. In our knowledge we are 
shut up to the present order of existence. 
We cannot look at life from the standpoint 
of any other order. It might be that to see 
it from another order would transmute death 
into blessed good fortune, the thing most 
to be desired. It might indeed, be found that 

"Death is but a change of key, 
In life the golden melody." 

On the personal plane, then, if we can trust 
the wisdom of the Supreme Personal Intelli- 
gence, even the last of the dark problems, if 
not finding abstract solution, may yet find 
one sufficient for the individual need. Even 
Henley, with his sense of pessimism, could 
come to look on death with complacency as 
the benediction of a departing day, thrilled 
with the sense of the triumphing night, 

Night with her train of stars 
And her great gift of sleep. 

In this mood he could pray with a steady 
courage, 

191 



PERSOKALISM AND THE 

"So be my passing! 
My task accomplished and the long day done, 
My wages taken, and in my heart 
Some late lark singing." 

Here too he came to look for the solution 
of earthly misunderstanding and irrecon- 
cilable ills as voiced in lines said to have 
been addressed to Robert Louis Steven- 
son: 

O Death and Time they chime and chime 

Like bells at sunset falling ! 

They end the song, they right the wrong, 

They set the old echoes calling: 
For Death and Time bring on the prime 

Of God's own chosen weather, 
And we lie in the peace of the Great Release 

As once in the grass together. 

It is not only impossible to face the prob- 
lem of evil with any satisfaction apart from 
the personalistic view. The problem can 
never be solved in the abstract. It must 
be solved in each particular case as it 
arises. In some cases this seems quite im- 
possible, but in most death comes as a 
benevolence to the individual, second only 
to birth itself. For, after all, the value of 
192 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

a life is not determined by its length, but 
by its realization of the highest things. 

Let the great winds their worst and wildest blow, 
Or the gold weather mellow round us slow: 
We have fulfilled ourselves, and we can dare 
And we can conquer. 

Personality is surely the richest gift of man, 
and who can deny that it is likewise the 
supreme possession of God? 

Mr. James has said in his Pluralistic Uni- 
verse: "A man's vision is the great fact 
about him. A philosophy is the expression 
of a man's intimate character, and all the 
definitions of the universe are but the de- 
liberately adopted reactions of human char- 
acters upon it." This was particularly true 
of Bowne. It, as much as his philosophy, 
was the source of his deep and widening 
influence. Men gathered from east and 
west to hear his teaching with varying 
preparation and adaptability for philosoph- 
ical endeavor. The intellectual rewards 
which they carried away were as varied 
as the men who came, but all had this in 
common: each was certain that he had felt 
193 



PERSONALISM AND THE 

the touch of a master spirit. They were 
one in a feeling of exaltation and inspira- 
tion. Wherever they have gone to the 
various tasks of business or professional 
life, or social ministry, they have gone 
even to the ends of the earth in a new, 
high sense of the greatness and meaning of 
life and with a loyalty that time cannot 
dim. If two such meet in the antipodes, 
the common meeting ground is "Did you 
take Bowne's work?" The underlying sig- 
nificance of all this is the inspiration of an 
unusual personality, a mind that rang so 
true that it satisfied the most questioning 
youth, a vision and an insight which lifted 
the student into the heights and enabled 
him to grasp the relations of life to the 
world, to man, and to God. Accused by 
the shallow-minded of heresy, the strong re- 
ligious tone of all Bowne's teaching was its 
predominant characteristic. This was the 
very point most criticized by his philo- 
sophical contemporaries, to whom the rec- 
ognition of religious verity was a sign of 
philosophical weakness. The religious note 
was never wanting as he unfolded to his 
194 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

eager students the thought of the great 
minds of the centuries. Never did he fail 
to draw them in perspective to the thought 
of One who was his Master. We 

"Watched the great hills, like clouds arise and set; 
And one named Olivet" 

was never missing from the horizon. 

For this reason he was at the close of 
life fitted as perhaps no other man of his 
time for great constructive religious and 
intellectual leadership. He was already be- 
ginning to influence profoundly the thought 
of the Orient as he had already influenced 
many in the West. It was his distinction to 
be almost better known in Germany than at 
home. His loyalty to an institution kept 
him from entering into that large measure 
of recognition that might have come to him 
earlier. So far as human judgment can dis- 
cern, he is gone too soon. But his work will 
live. It was done so truly, so conscien- 
tiously, so greatly, that its influence is 
certain to deepen with the passing years. 
This will prove true in that age which we 
feel is just at hand, when men will more 
195 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

generally recognize the inadequacy of great 
thinking which is lacking in reverence and 
respect for the profounder realities and 
problems of our mortal life. There is that 
in the work of Bowne that answers to the 
deepest spiritual questionings, and in death 
as in life he can await the judgment of the 
years unhumiliated and unafraid. 



196 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Included in this list are the titles which have been 
found most helpful in the particular field covered. 
It does not aim to be exhaustive. 

General 
Adamson, Development of Modern Philosophy. 
Bowne, Metaphysics. 
Bowne, Personalism. 
Bowne, Philosophy of Theism. 
Bowne, Studies in Christianity. 
Bowne, The Essence of Religion. 
Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge. 
Caird, Problems of Philosophy at the Present Time. 
Dewing, Introduction to the History of Modern 

Philosophy. 
Eucken, The Problem of Human Life. 
Hoffding, History of Modern Philosophy. 
Janet and Sailles, History of the Problems of 

Philosophy. 
Kiilpe, Philosophy of the Present in Germany. 
Pneiderer, Philosophy and Development of Religion. 
Windelband, History of Philosophy. 
197 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Ancient Philosophy 
Adamson, Development of Greek Philosophy. 
Aristotle, Logic. 
Aristotle, Metaphysics. 

Eucken, Fundamental Concepts of Modern Thought. 
Eucken, Life's Basis and Life's Ideal. 
Gompers, Greek Thinkers. 

Materialism 
Bowne, Kant and Spencer. 
Eucken, The Truth of Religion. 
HofTding, Influence of the Conception of Evolution. 
Lange, History of Materialism. 

Kant 

Bowne, Kant and Spencer. 
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. 
Stahlin, Kant, Lotze, and Ritschl (Reply to Lange, 
Materialism). 

Lotze 

Caspari, Hermann Lotze, etc., pp. 4 and 53. 

Falckenberg, Hermann Lotze. 

Jones, Critical Account of the Philosophy of Lotze. 

Kiilpe, Philosophy of the Present in Germany (Lotze 
chapter). 

Lotze, Metaphysics. 

Lotze, Microcosmus. 

Pfleiderer, Lotze's philosophische Weltanschauung 
nach ihren Grundzugen. (Sympathetic treat- 
ment.) 

198 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Schiller, Humanism (Reference to Lotze). 
Seth, Development from Kant to Hegel. 

Pragmatism 

Bawden, Principles of Pragmatism. 

Berthelot, Un Romantisme utilitaire (Volume II 

contains exhaustive treatment of Bergson's 

Pragmatism). 
Davidson, The Stoic Creed. 
De Laguna, Dogmatism and Evolution. 
Haldane, Pathway to Reality. 
James, Essays in Radical Empiricism. 
James, Pluralistic Universe. 
James, Pragmatism. 
James, Problems of Philosophy. 
James, Will to Believe. 

Jourdain, Theory of the Infinite in Modern Thought. 
Lyman, Influence of Pragmatism on Theology. 
Parker, Plato and Pragmatism (short essay, but 

very good). 
Schiller, Humanism. 

Schiller, Riddles of the Sphinx (3rd edition). 
Schinz, Anti-pragmatism. 
Vernon Lee, Vital Lies. 

Bergson 

Bergson, Creative Evolution. 

Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics (Article, 

Metaphysical and Moral Revelation, January, 

'03). 

199 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bergson, Matter and Memory. 

Bergson, The Immediate Data of Consciousness. 

Bergson, Time and Free Will. 

Hermann, Eucken and Bergson. 

James, Pluralistic Universe, Chapter VI. 

Le Roy, New Philosophy of Bergson. 

Ruhe and Paul, Henri Bergson, An Account of His 

Life and Personality. 
Solomon, Bergson. 

Eucken 
Eucken, Life's Basis and Life's Ideal. 
Eucken, Main Currents of Modern Thought." 
Eucken, Problem of Human Life. 
Eucken, The Life of the Spirit. 
Eucken, The Truth of Religion. 
Gibson, Eucken's Philosophy of Life. 
Hermann, Eucken and Bergson. 



200 



INDEX 

Arcesilaus, pragmatist, 115 

Aristotle's attempt to reconcile universal and particular, 74; 
relation to Plato, 74; hostile to doctrine of Divine Per- 
sonality, 79f.; Divine Will as Prime Mover, 78f.; view of 
knowledge, 20f. 

Atomism, as basis of perception, 51ff., 77f., 184f., Bacon's 
contribution to, 55; begins with Leucippus, 50; as a method 
of science, 58, 184f.; a phantom of thought, 52f., 56, 73; 
of Epicurus, 54; of Stoics, 54f; restricted value, 57 

Bergson, his abstractness, 151, 167; a becoming God impos- 
sible, 157f., 160-162; criticism of Spencer, 59, 69, 146f.; 
definition of Being, 147f.; reality, as "vital impulse," 
147f.; statement of problem of philosophy, 145f.; time as 
duration, 148ff., 158f. 

Bowne, advance on Aristotle's World-Ground, 79; advance 
from Lotze's position, 105ff.; in definition of reality, 105 
affirming Personality fundamental, 106-108; avoids deter- 
minism of empiricism, 132f.; his central thought, 19, 183f. 
compared with Lotze, 19, 22; limits realm of physics, 103 
denies explanation by classification, 103; refuses astound- 
ing claims of atomism, 103; denies absentee God, 103f 
points emptiness of mechanical causation, 104 

Bowne's criticism of Spencer, 59, 60; debt to Lotze, 102 
definition of Being, 13 If.; definition of reality, 74f., 83 
106, 108f.;, definition of religion, 25, 29, 141; personality 
193-196; Eucken's estimate of, 18ff., 24, 30; philosophical 
aim, 11; idea of ethics* 20, 141; metaphysical theism, 25 
opposition to absolutism, 130L; opposition to naturalism 
24; pragmatism, 130-141; religious interest, 20; sincerity 
19f.; starting point, life, 25-27; theism, 25; view of the 
incarnation, 176ff.; view of the practical, 27f.; view of time 
and space, 137ff., 159ff. 

Bruno, conception of monads, 55 

201 



INDEX 

Carneades's pragmatism, 115 

Causation, efficient and phenomenal, 57, 79, 81, 94, 133; 

explained in terms of personality, 80f., 133 
Cause and effect, 78, 133 

Change and personality, 91, 134, 139, 155f., 184 
Common-sense view of the world, 39 
Creative evolution, 40, 105-167 

Deity of Jesus, moral necessity, 176-181, 189f. 
Democritus, relation to materialism, 52 
Descartes, theory of induction, 56 
Doubt and prosperity, 38 
Dualism of Kant, 94 

Epicurus' atomism, 54 

Error, the problem of naturalism, 75, 82 

Error, problem of, met by personalism, 75, 83. 

Eucken quoted, 11, 80, on pragmatism, 113, 128f. 

Eucken and Bowne, pupils of Lotze, 169 

Eucken, relation to Bowne, 15, 169f., 174f. 

Eucken's "activism" to solve philosophical antithesis, 171; 

difficulty with the idea of incarnation, 175f.; particular 

contribution, 174, 180f.; supreme message, 181f.; view of 

truth, 170f. 
Evil, problem of idealism, 75 
Evil, problem of, not avoided by pluralism, 125f.; met by 

personalism, 76, 83, 187-193 
Evolutionist confusion of cause and effect, 25 

Fallacy of the universal, 68; main support of Spencer, 68; 
in Bergson, 151 

Faust, Walpurgis Night, 58 

First Cause not reached by naturalism, 78 

Freedom, attended by error and evil, 76; dependent on per- 
sonality, 82f., 125, 152f., 185fL; not reached by pluralism, 
125; through activism, in Eucken, 174 

202 



INDEX 

Galileo's application of mathematical principle, 56 
God, as Immanent Mover, Bowne's view, 79, 159ff., 184f.; 
as Prime Mover, Aristotle's view, 78f.; Bergson's view, 161f.; 
becoming God of Bergson, not tenable, 157ff., 162; behind 
phenomena, 23, 161, 184f.; chief argument for, the prac- 
tical interest, 95f.; underlying principle of the world, 22, 
29, 161 
Greek philosophy, contribution to science, 50 

Hegel's absolute idealism, 98, 100; doctrine of thought 

processes, 24; view of religion, 26 
Henley quoted, 190, 191, 192 
Hylozoism, 55, 57 

Idealism, inadequate for explanation, 39, 40; must answer 

problem of evil, 41 
Immanence, Divine, 79 
Incarnation, Bowne's view, 176ff.; Eucken's exception to, 

174f.; necessary to thought, 175f., 189 
Indestructibility of matter a working postulate, 66 
Intuition, value to religion, 166-168 
Intuitional and reflective knowledge, 164-167 

James, William, pragmatism, 116-129; guilty of abstract- 
ness, 117 

Kant's contribution, constitutive activity of mind, 87; dual- 
ism, 94; effort for objective validity fails, 90f.; subjectivism, 
92f.; view of reality, 93; view of time and space, 87; saw 
only subjective side, 89 

Lee, Vernon, quoted, 127f. 

Leucippus, founder of atomism, 50 

Lotze compared with Bowne, 19, 22, 105ff.; opposed to 

absolutism, 99f. 
Lotze's aim, 19, 98f.; definition of reality, 101; idealism, 98, 

101; relation to Hegel, 98, 100; religion, 19 

203 



INDEX 

"Man the measure of all," 51, 113 

Master man, quoted, 31 

Material basis of modern philosophy, 33 

Materialism, its abstraction completed in Democritus, 52; 
its doctrine of reality, 73; ignores metaphysical factors, 73; 
inadequate for explanation, 38ff., 56f., 77f.; its moral 
insufficiency, 82; of Spencer indicated in his doctrine of 
mind, 69; use of atomic theory, 50, 73, 75, 77f. 

Matter, indestructibility of, working postulate, 66 

Mechanical view of thought process, 39, 82 

Memory, racial, emptiness of theory, 150f.; unaccounted for 
by Spencer, 64, 71f. 

Mill, John Stuart, quoted, 62 

Mind, constitutive activity, Kant's discovery, 87f. 

Naturalism, cannot provide for freedom, 185ff.; its abstract- 
ness, 58; based on visible, 24; inadequate for explanation, 
38-40, 56f., 185ff.; possesses only phenomenal world, 77f.; 
present attitude toward Spencer, 59 

Nature, new feeling toward, 35 

Neoplatonism, influence of, 74 

Nervous action, as "double-faced," 70 

Novelty as a factor in evolution, 69; attempted in Bergson's 
"elan vital," 147f., 155ff. 

Noyes, Alfred, quoted, "Resurrection," 37; "Creation," 77; 
"Vicisti Galileae," 190 

Optimism, attendant on struggle, 33 

Pain, modern attitude toward, 41f. 

Pantheism of Stoics, 54; untenable, 136f. 

Perception, more than nervous affection, 78, 184; Bergson's 

view of, 145 
Permanence, problem of, 91f. 
Personalism and freedom, 185ff.; related to problems of life, 

183-196; solution of philosophical antithesis, 44f., 134f., 

183f.; and problems of error and evil, 83; and problems of 

space and time, 90, 106, 137ff., 184 

204 



INDEX 

Personality, and change, 91, 134, 139, 1551., 184; divine, as 
efficient cause, 79, 81, 133, 135; keynote to religion and 
ethics, 20; novel factor in causation, 80f. 

Pessimism, fruit of material fullness, 33 

Phenomena, demand intelligent Cause, 93 

Phenomena, two contrasting views, 23 

Phenomenal and efficient causation, 57 

Phenomenalism of Lotze, 101 

Philosophy, influenced by circumstances, 33; its new task, 43ff. 

Plato, ethical nature of his rationalism, 52; his doctrine of 
Ideas, 129; relation to Aristotle, 74; resistance of mate- 
rialism, 74; "true being," 52 

Pluralism, failure to unite subject and object, 123ff., 133f.; 
insufficiency, 42f., 133f.; outcome of materialism, 40, 42; 
unable to meet problem of evil, 126 

Pragmatic attempt at unity through space and time, 121, 
133f., 137ff.; doctrine of unity, 127, 133; judgment of 
religious values, 96, 140ff.; pluralism and freedom, 125, 
133f.; test of truth, 116f., 118f., 120, 129, 130f., 140ff. 

Pragmatism, misuse of, 38; moral influence of, 113f., 126, 140f.; 
in modern life, 37f., 40; of Bowne, 130-141; of Pyrrho and 
the new academy, 115; of the Sophists, 113 

Pragmatists, ancient, 114f.; modern, 115f. 

Problems, essential to philosophy, 10; Bergson's statement of 
them, 145f. 

Protagoras, a pragmatist, 113; perception due to atomic 
action, 51 

"Pure Form" in Democritus; system, 52; in Plato's thought, 52 

Purposive intelligence, the bugbear of pluralism, 43 

Pyrrho, a pragmatist, 115 

Rationalistic definitions of truth, 116f. 

Reality, Bergson's definition, 74f.; Bowne's definition, 101; 
Eucken's definition, 174f.; Kant's view of, 93; Lotze's 
definition, 101; Spencer's account of, 64f.; fundamental 
definition of philosophy, 10, 73 

Reality of pain and evil, 41 

205 



INDEX 

Religion and ethics, their relation, 20, 25, 29 

Religion, the basis of life, 21; in relation to theology, 27, 29; 
Kant's view of, 26, 29, 94f.; not subject to ordinary proof, 
20f., 94f., 97; not wholly subjective, 30 ; the spiritual 
experience of humanity, 25 

Ruskin quoted, 32 



Schiller, F. C. S., on the Absolute, view of truth, 130 

Schopenhauer, personal untruth, 19 

Schleiermacher's view of religion, 26 

Science, relation to modern life, 35; relation to modern 

philosophy, 34f. 
Space and time made the fundamental realities in pragmatism, 

121, 137ff.; as forms of thought, 87f.; must possess objective 

validity, 89f. 
Spencer and modern naturalism, 59 
Spencer's appeal to "persistence of force," 66; definition of 

life, 69; denial of materialism, 61; doctrine of mind, 69f. ; 

doctrine of reality, 64f.; doctrine of the Unknowable, 61f., 

78 ; empiricism, 61; materialism indicated by doctrine of 

mind, 69; relativity, 65; relation to theism and religion, 60; 

theory of evolution, 67; supported by fallacy of universal, 68 
Spinoza, personal sincerity, 19 
Spiritual basis of life, 28 

Spiritual, incapable of expression in language, 23 
Spirituality, impossible apart from personality, 22 
Stoics, preservation of atomism, 54 
Swinburne, quoted, "watch in the night," 38, 45 

Time as "bastard space," 150f.; as "duration," 148-152; 
with God as ground of its "duration," 158ff.; impossible 
except to abiding intelligence, 88, 122, 138f.; 152, 159f. 

Time and space as forms of thought, 87f.; ideal yet objectively 
valid, 137ff., 150f.; as viewed by Bowne, 137f. 

Truth, universal validity of, in Eucken's view, 170f. 

206 



INDEX 

Unity, by "activism," Eucken's solution, 170f.; found only 
in mind and spirit, 22; necessary even to pluralism, 124, 
134; possible through personality, 134f., 153f., 156f., 183f.; 
by primal impulse; Aristotle's view, 78f.; Bergson's view, 
147f, 154ff.; problem of, 21, 49f., 133f., 147f. t 156f., 170f., 
183f.; struggle for, 38, 49; in Greek thought, 50 

Utilitarianism, demanded in life, 37 

"Vital impulse," Bergson's necessary factor of evolution, 
152ff.; Bergson's ground of being, 147f. 

World-Ground must be personal, 81f. 



207 



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